Developmental systems and languages

Developmental systems were introduced (Lindenmayer, 1968, 1971) in order to model morphogenetic (pattern-generating) processes in growing, multicellular, filamentous organisms. These systems were originally conceived as linear arrays of interconnected finite automata, each automaton corresponding to a living cell, with the possibility that new automata can be added to the array (cells divide) or be deleted from the array (cells die). Each cell in the array is supposed to have the same state-transition and output functions. As required by biological considerations these functions must be applied to all cells in the array simultaneously at each time step. Thus one obtains infinite sequences of arrays once the functions and the initial arrays are specified. Simplified constructs are defined (and used in this paper) by considering the states and outputs to be identical and thus omitting the output functions. Such filamentous developmental systems have been called “Lindenmayer models” Herman, 1969, 1970) or “L-systems” (Van Dalen, 1971).