home>In Silico Flurries — A Snowflake Catalogue

thermodynamics + art

Explore the land of Neradia and meet the snowflake named Arenh Jerrus of Bosmen in the wintertime tale In Silico Flurries: Computing the world of snow in Scientific American's SA Visual story about beauty, imagination and machine learning. A collaboration with Jake Lever.

This project uses unwords.

It's Snowing in my CPU — a Snowflake catalogue

Now she was round and as pure as the morning light, crystal clear and like a tiny silver mirror she was able to catch and give back every colour in the world about her.
— Paul Gallico, Snowflake

Somewhere in the world, it's snowing. But you don't need to go far—it's always snowing on this page. Explore random flurries, snowflake families and individual flakes. There are many unusual snowflakes and snowflake family 12 and family 46 are very interesting.

But don't settle for only pixel snowflakes—make an STL file and 3D print your own flakes!

Ad blockers may interfere with some flake images—the names of flakes can trigger ad filters.

And if after reading about my flakes you want more, get your frozen fix with Kenneth Libbrecht's excellent work and Paul Gallico's Snowflake.

≡ random sample families snowland flake oddities posters scientific american 3D print credits & code

This is a collection of snowflakes simulated using the Gravner-Griffeath model, composed of 15,541 snowflakes grouped into 50 families using k-means clustering. This snowflake collection took 128.4 CPU days to compute.

Flakes are categorized by gender. A flake is categorized as female if the freezing parameter `\kappa < \kappa_{\text{median}}`, otherwise it is male.

Each snowflake is also given a unique name generated from a recursive neural network assigned alphabetically based on the snowflake's `\theta` attachment parameter.