Digital DNA?

Hello All, I'm looking to find out how I may go about the following, without using and VB scripting...

I want to have a data input, where one can enter characters (numbers and or letters) and depending on what characters are entered, those characters influence an object, basically allowing one to control say the length of a line, or #/distribution of points in a grid, by typing in some form of data. The order of these characters would ideally influence.

I see this as a kind of digital DNA, by where the end result will always be unique, because the input data is unique.

Does anyone know where I can look to get started? What should I be searching for?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on May 29, 2013 at 6:41pm

That's roughly what all the parametric modelling is about.

Permalink Reply by Dan Greenberg on May 29, 2013 at 6:48pm

Obviously. I'm looking to do something that goes beyond slider control and distance relationships for a study. I guess I need to clarify...

Think of it like this...in a data input, I type "hello world". That line of characters creates a 3D region of points and connects some of those points with lines. However, if I typed "world hello" the number of points, region size, and resulting line would be completely different.

I want the control input to be able to accept text and numbers in any combination.

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on May 29, 2013 at 7:14pm

Search for Chomsky's generative grammatics (this is a linguistic notion but gives a good viewpoint of what came afterwards), then take a look at L-systems (Lindenmayer systems) or shape grammars. The GH plugin which may be helpful here is Rabbit (as far as I remember its made by morphocode).

Permalink Reply by Dan Greenberg on May 29, 2013 at 7:16pm

Great, thanks for the assistance. Sometimes you just need to know where and what to look for, ya know?

Permalink Reply by Dan Greenberg on May 29, 2013 at 7:17pm

Is there a way to do a kind of "IF THEN" where I say if A then output =1, if B then = 2, etc. ?

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on May 29, 2013 at 7:30pm

Yes, there are some components for that in Maths tab, but I usually do it with Expression component (it may've change name lastly, its also in the Maths section). You can write there expressions more-less in the same manner as in excel.

(your problem is something like If(A>B,1,2)).

Permalink Reply by Manuel on May 29, 2013 at 8:37pm