Future Work:

What is we replaced folding with some other mechanical operation, such as some specific type of growth? Growth seems much more fundamental to morphogenesis - much more so than local deformation or even cell mobility.  This might allow better analogies to biological systems. Mobilitiy seems more fundamental to other systems - colonies of individual cells (sporulation), ants etc rather than multicellular organisms.  An interesting point is that pattern formation is the most fundamental of all to embryogenesis and that is somewhat how both origami language and gpl get their power.

An interesting application would be to produce a language for construction of nanostructures using collagen deposits. Would require control of collagen production and an understanding of how forms tubes, vs other thingsa and then pattern the cells to perform the correct functions.
 

• Interesting Similarities with GPL:  Both languages have parallels to the mathematical language of straight-edge and compass constructions - which gives them significant descriptive power. Both are also constructive languages - from a few simple initial conditions, new conditions are created at each step  that can be subsequently used. Thus at the local level,  origami exploits similar biologically-inspired primitives such as gradients and tropisms to organize the cells along with new primitives that require sensing contact. Both approaches are very different from previous work , such as cellular automata and reaction diffusion, where the local rules create emergent patterns and how one creates these local rules is poorly understood.
• Interesting Differences with GPL: The program is relative to the boundery conditions and within the program there is no notion of absolute distance. Also the initial conditions are always the same and are just boundery conditions.
• Regions and DNA code reuse: The idea of restricting local rules to act only within a region has an interesting application to code reuse. If the regions have impassable bounderies and do not overlap then the same code (or dna) with the same gradients (protiens) can be used to create multiple structures. Add to this the idea of scale independence and one could engineer a hand pattern, simply by using the same code in regions of different sizes and this program would be easily modified (or mutated) to produce extra fingers. This hase implications for how simple mutations in fruit flies can create extra limbs and wings and how the majority of the dna code can remain the same accross wide variety of creatures.
• Applications to other Global Shapes(future work): Can the ideas from origami (and insights into the similarities with GPL)  be applied to creating global shape in other domains, such as proteo. Are there some axioms or basic shapes for constructing global shapes from mobile but connected cells. Currently Yim's approach is very bottom up: cells move towards the nearest goal location; each cell has a representation of the final shape (set of goals), partial knowledge of what goal locations have been filled (or rather what unfilled locations remain) slowly accumulated from neighbors and a means for determining the nearest goal (distance metric). This is a very different approach from either origami or GPL, and although it is much less communication intensive it seems to require a coordinate system. Could the amorphous computing approach work here? Unclear since we've rarely dealt with mobile cells.
• Pattern, Form and Function (future work):So far Daniel Coore's thesis on GPL (Growing Point Language) tackles pattern formation and the origami work begins to tackle the creation of form. The next question is can we tackle function? Can one describe a global function (circulate blood in a particular direction, move food through digestive system at a particular rate, extract oxygen (or nutrients or information) and discard) and automatically derive the local rules, or program,  that each cell must run in order to achieve this. What kind of high level languages are there for describing global functions (logic?) and will it share the same properties with GPL and Origami? Will the same primitives from pattern formation and global shape formation be applicable?

• Questions
• what is the limitation of using Local Deformation vs migration, growth, and reproduction:
• Characterize shapes that can be formed by origami (fold flat) and those that can't (curved faces, lines)