Abstract
When as children we were presented with the gift of a terrarium, aquarium, ant farm or chemical garden, we were given much more than a toy. We were given dresser-top universes that gave us admiration and passion for the natural world. Cyberspace is becoming an increasingly rich space for the evolution of form. Nerve Garden seeks to express natural forms by allowing people to plant a seed in cyberspace and populate a virtual terrarium (Fig. 1). Nerve Gardeners use aJava applet to germinate compelling models of plants from L-systems, a kind of fractal genetic algorithm. Users can mutate their plants' forms and even generate animals that possess branching or segmented body plans (such as arthropods). The user's final step is to place their virtual organisms into a collective garden, expressed in a three-dimensional Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) scene. The next version of Nerve Garden will
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