Generative systems are systems that use a few basic rules to yield patterns. Depending on the rules, the patterns can be extremely varied and unpredictable. One of the more well-known examples is Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton. Another example is Boids. More examples can be found in generative music, generative art, and, more recently, in video games such as Spore.
Famous quotes containing the words generative and/or systems:
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)