Boxed In: a look at recursion

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“To understand recursion, you must understand recursion.”

(How I love this.)

I made one of my little generative art animations with the idea of seeing what kind of effect I could get from recursively drawing some simple shape or shapes over and over again with small changes.

I used just a box and a circle and came up with this:

While coding, this happens when a function being defined is applied within it’s own definition, like this:

function makeBox(x, y, s) {
    translate(x, y);
    rotate(s / 10 + (col / 2) % 360);
    // blah, blah, blah
    {
        makeBox(x + s / 4, y, s / 2);
        makeBox(x - s / 4, y, s / 2);
        makeBox(x, y + s / 4, s / 2);
    }
}

In this case the function makeBox calls itself within it’s own definition. This can be very powerful. And so much fun!

I hope you enjoy.

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