Laurens Lapre's Projects: About Me

Welcome to my Page of Personal Ramblings ...

Apart from being a workaholic, mutating and Lparsing stuff, playing Guild Wars, watching movies, amateur acting and singing, working on my projects, reading esoterica, reading science fiction, surfing the web, and bloging I do have a life!

Well ... now that I come to think of it ... that was most of it already ...

Lapré FAQ

But let's get the record straight first, since I'm getting an ever increasing amount of personal email as well through my website.

You should have noticed by now that I'm male ... surprised? Some of you might be! There is no need to interpret Laurens as meaning Lauren's or sending Laura Lapre email at my address. Laurens is just Dutch for Laurence. My images were distributed on the Wirehead Computer Art CD-ROM by Quantum Axcess and on the box I'm listed as Lauren Lapre, maybe this started it off. But remarks like "Great that women are doings things like this these days ..." are quite lost on me. We will consider all this as wishful thinking for now ... Here an example of what I'm talking about:

Yes, I'm the author of RenderStar, a visualization product, but it has been over 10 years since I've worked on this software and I'm not fluent with it anymore to answer more than the most basic of questions about it. The product was also sold as Virtual Image by Eagle Point, ARE-24 for ArchtT by Ketiv Inc and was incorporated into CadKey's DataCad product line. You can still find images created by it on the net but you really have to try hard by now.

My name is Lapré (pronounced as lepray) but it gets ASCII-ed down to Lapre most of the time. I don't know if this makes me a relative of Don Lapre but it is possible. There not that many Lapré's on the net yet, I've you run into one with a Net presence ... mail me. To the right is the coat of arms of my family.

I don't have a background in Mathematics (I don't have one in programming either but that never stopped me) so asking me to partake in complex algebraic studies to push forward the theoretical frontiers of L-systems is a nice thought ... but also a complete waste of time ! My background is in Cognitive Psychology ... not that I work in that field either. My current job is advising large governmental agencies in the use of Information Technology. I've specialized in the use of Internet and Intranet technologies and the different changes the organizations and their current state of IT have to go through to fully realize the potential these new technologies can bring to bear. Phew ... almost sounds like a real job ... We call it E-Government now and you can see some of my ideas on it on the Publication page.

Some Thoughts on the Lparser ...

It were books like The Blind Watchmaker from Dawkins and the mutation studies of Latham that send me on the road looking for my own geometry generator to do genetic programming on 3d shapes. I had some experience with 2d L-systems/turtle graphics and this language seemed ideal to me to apply mutations too. Since I had an elaborate source and working knowledge of 3d graphics and vector manipulation, from working on RenderStar, I decided that I would create a 3d Lsystem parser that would allow for mutation. The hardest section, parsing a L-systems production string into 3d renderable geometry was partly solved by the RenderStar product already. I started adding different output options for the different render products until people stopped asking for new ones.

After playing with first version of the program I started to distribute it using a local BBS, fidonet and later Internet as a freeware application to make tree's and bushes. Since the L-systems language is quite hard to learn for a novice I supplied a large series of example Ls files to give the user something to start with. Yet the product has a very steep learning curve. Although I have seen a sizeable number of people incorporate Lparser shapes into their images, only a few have actually explored the possibilities of the language. L-system rules are a very efficient coding system. I do like the idea that one can code a complete forest, no two trees being the same, detailed down to the single leave, in less then 100 bytes.

With the Lparser I explored all kinds off concepts like genetic drift and did a lot of the experiments mentioned in The Blind Watchmaker myself. It was very interesting to see the difference between mutation on the genotype level (using the -u option) and randomness introduced on the fenotype level (with the ~ command). Sometimes one would have a piece of the L-system being disabled during mutation runs and then suddenly be activated again. Leading to sudden shape changes in otherwise slowly developing forms.

The Lparser was made to be able to parse broken L-systems rules. Apart from the start parameters and the EOF marker one can feed it pretty much random characters and it will still function. This allows the mutation algorithm to be completely context free since it does not have to worry about destroying the integrity of the L-systems rules. Playing with mutation I discovered much the same effects as you will find described in the write ups of several genetic simulators (fi. the Tierra simulator). As a modeling language and tool, the Lparser can create all kinds of organic shapes. I like the shapes best where you can see that they have an organic quality but you can not make out if they are plant or animal. So there is something which we can identify as organic yet is independent of it being a specific animal or plantlike life-form.