This explorable illustrates the dynamics of the famous hypercycle model. It was originally conceived by Peter Schuster and Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen (1927-2019) in 1979 to investigate the chemical basis of the origin of life. Because living things make copies of themselves, in the beginning complex chemicals like polymer chains, including small RNA molecules (see e.g. RNA-world), had to acquire the ability to catalyse their own synthesis from smaller parts, e.g. single nucleotides.

With this explorable you can discover a variety of spatio-temporal patterns that can be generated with a very famous and simple autocatalytic reaction diffusion system known as the Gray-Scott model. In the model two substances $U$ and $V$ interact and diffuse in a two-dimensional container. Although only two types of simple reactions occur, the system generates a wealth of different stable and dynamic spatio-temporal patterns depending on system parameters.

This explorable illustrates a process known as diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA). It’s a kinetic process driven by randomly diffusing particles that gives rise to fractal structures, reminiscent of things we see in natural systems. The process has been investigated in a number of scientific studies, e.g. the seminal paper by Witten & Sander.

This explorable of a pattern forming system is derived from a model that was designed to understand co-existance of cyclicly interacting species in a spatially extended model ecosystem. Despite its simplicity, it can generate a rich set of complex spatio-temporal patterns depending on the choice of parameters and initial conditions.