Ghost diagrams: Tilings of the plane

This site takes a given pattern and tries to find a way to tile the plane with that pattern. From the site itself:

Ghost Diagrams is a program that takes sets of tiles and tries to find patterns into which they may be formed. The patterns it finds when given randomly chosen tiles are often surprising.

It turns out that tiling patterns are a form of computation of equal power to Turing machines, lambda calculus, and cellular automata. For example, here is a tileset implementing "Rule 110", a cellular automaton known to be capable of universal computation. Considerations similar to the halting problem and Godel's theorem apply. There is no upper limit to their capacity to surprise us. Furthermore, tiles have an intuitive quality that other forms of computation lack. You can see how they fit together.

An organism is more than the sum of its organs. When the organs are fitted together, the organism becomes something more. This surprising something more we call "spirit" or "ghost". Ghost Diagrams finds the ghosts implicit in simple sets of tiles.

See this draft chapter from my thesis for further details and pretty pictures.

These are quite beautiful. Enjoy.

(Hat tip: Ilachina, a frequent and respected contributor.)