"Extreme" Origami?

I enjoy doing a little (very simple) origami now and then. At my job, a lot of paper is produced and if it is not folded into something useful, then it is simply thrown out, shredded, and ultimately ashed. Well, I am amazed to see just how far some true origami experts have taken the art in their quest for greatness. It is now considered a "sport".

These days patterns requiring more than 100 steps are common. Some of that competitive acceleration is due to Lang, who transformed the art by writing a computer program that can generate the blueprint for ultracomplex origami sculptures. Even with digital assistance, figuring out the sequence of folds that will create a beetle and all its ornaments is a mathematical problem of staggering complexity. Still, the reigning champion of intricate origami is a 23-year-old Japanese savant named Satoshi Kamiya. Unaided by software, he recently produced what is considered the pinnacle of the field, an eight-inch-tall Eastern dragon with eyes, teeth, a curly tongue, sinuous whiskers, a barbed tail, and a thousand overlapping scales. The folding alone took 40 hours, spread out over several months.

Check out the article. Some of the designs shown there are truly amazing. It makes my silly little swans and balloons look even more juvenile than they are.