I would like to find a numeric representation of kazakh national ornaments for generating new ones. The ornaments essentially consist of combinations of relatively basic ornaments. Usually the ornaments are symmetrical. Here are few examples of basic elements: (The images are a bit distorted) And this is an example of a more complex ornament: How could I encode an ornament's representation in as few numbers as possible? So that I could write a program that would generate an ornament, given some sequence of numbers Any ideas are appreciated. As I write this, I have thought that generating images of snowlfakes may be somewhat relevant, although it's possibly just a fractal.