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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Spirals are one of those things that looks purposeful but is really easy to construct using a few simple emergent rules.

"Make new honeycomb cells at the edge of the honeycomb."

"Don't get more than 10 cells from the old honeycomb."

There you go, a 10-cell-wide spiral.

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"Comb building may be better explained by the competing hypothesis of stigmergy, which holds that appropriate building behaviour is stimulated by previous construction. That is, each builder works according to an algorithm that tells her what to do when she encounters a structure at a particular stage of development. Her actions advance the structure to a new form that in turn stimulates the appropriate next step, either by her or by the next worker to encounter the building site."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282924880_Comb_Arch...

Without a rule about altitude changes or something how would you get a spiral from this rather than just a circle?

If the individual pods are a bit asymmetrical (not a perfect cylinder) the overall surface with have some curvature.

So that rule can implicit as well: avoid collision with the existing comb floor by ramping either up on top of it, or down underneath. The spiral staircase structure starts to appear as soon as you encircle the axis and choose a vertical direction to continue with. With each orbit, the structure becomes more obvious.

I don’t think there was any intention of trying to describe a comprehensive rule set in this thread.

I agree I was just trying to understand it further. I've always thought the idea of modeling the world was really interesting but it's always been a tad abstract to me so I was trying to get a little insight into it.

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