Hi all!,
For a long time I have had in my mind this vision of creating a game involving plant growth and user interaction. Today I was doing some researching on plant growth algs and I found this very cool flash animation:

http://www.snepo.com/experiments/Growth.html

so my question is: do you guys know the name of such algs?

I'm more concerned about how fast the alg will be than its mathematical correctness.

cheers!,
Fabio

While I don't know much about it I once looked into the same thing and came up continually with "L-Systems" in my searches, look them up kinda what you need...

and...

http://pcg.wikidot.com/pcg-algorithm:plant-generation

Especially check out the links, while most of them generate a full plant you could take what they do and expand it to make them grow in an animated fashion.

Its not much but I hope that sorta helps.

Well you could use fractals...(im pretty sure that means you'll have to write a recursive function to render)
[media][/media]
I'm pretty sure there is a tree fractal algorithim somewhere on the net.
Just look it up.
For the math part I think you might have to use geometric sequences to figure out how many branches you want draw..ect.