Dragon Curve

The Dragon curve is a two-dimensional fractal, also known as Jurassic Park dragon.
It can easily be created with a piece of paper:
  1. Fold it \(n\)-times in the same direction.
  2. Unfold the paper. Every fold is either a hill or a valley.
  3. Twist every fold to make it a \(90^\circ\) corner. If it´s a hill, twist it to the right, if it´s a valley, twist it to the left.
You can see a visualization of this process below.


Dragon curve paper strip.png
Dragon Curve Unfolding


Formula
The formula for this calculation looks like this:
\(A=\{\text{"L"},\text{"R"}\}, w\in A\)
\(w_1=\text{"R"}\)
\(w_{n+1}=w_n\left[1:|w_n|\right]\cdot \text{"R"}\cdot w_n\left[1:\frac{|w_n|}{2}\right]\cdot \text{"L"}\cdot w_n\left[1+\frac{|w_n|}{2}:|w_n|\right]\)
\(w\) resembles a word, \(w[i:j]\) is a substring of \(w\) with chars from position \(i\) to position \(j\).
You can see that the function recursively determines the folding directions.
The calculated word is then translated into a line with one corner for each char of the word. The line makes a left turn when a char is equal to \(\text{"L"}\) and a right turn when it´s equal to \(\text{"R"}\). The outcome is visualized below.




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