:discomedusa:

strange attractors

strange attractor
(chaos vocabulary, continued.)

' An attracting set that has zero measure in the embedding phase space and has fractal dimension. Trajectories within a strange attractor appear to skip around randomly.'
(mathworld.com again)

(above: a dejong attractor from postulate.org)

also,

'Strange Attractor:  Celebrating unpopular culture'

'...we declare war on mediocrity and a pox on the foot soldiers of stupidity. join us!''

wow!  i'm so excited to have found this site!  strange attractor's website is plastered with jellyfish, radiolarian-looking things, and other oddities. apparently, this strange attractor is a publisher of interesting oddities, as well as a uk resource for events and music.

here's a blurb about their third jounal:

Trip in a Vicorian time machine; wig out on psychoactive fauna; swing to the sounds of Martin Denny and the sex poetry of Arthur Koestler; ponder the occult roots of modern art and the literary kingdom of Redonda; gawp at the history of extra-uterine conception and recto-genesis; marvel at the house of dolls and the subterranean domain of Joseph Williamson; and more, more, more...

 

(fun blog, too: 'further:strange attractor & beyond')  i think i'm a fan!

the chaos game

quantum chaos computing
(aka 'yay, pretty fractal pictures!')

[above image] created using the CRAY supercomputers available at the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute and Uppsala University of Sweden.  <source>

 

when i was in seventh grade, i did a math report on 'patterns in nature'; in eighth grade, my topic was 'fractals'.  i remember painstakingly typing pages of basic into the school computer and marvelling that the lines of incomprehensible code could render such a fantastic image.

these topics have been of recurring interest to me over the years.  but rather than pursue the (doubtlessly more lucrative) understanding of how computers use code to create commands and images, i instead remained captivated by the intricacy and perfection of random and repetitive natural forms. 

(above: a fractal fern generated by the chaos game)

i was zoning out on the internet just now and paid a visit to MathWorld.com,"the web's most extensive mathematical resource."  (it's a lot of fun...check it out!)
i was brushing up on my fractal facts and found a some great terms that i thought should be shared.

the chaos game

' An algorithm originally described by Barnsley in 1988. Pick a point at random inside a regular -gon. Then draw the next point a fraction of the distance between it and a polygon vertex  picked at random. Continue the process (after throwing out the first few points). The result of this "chaos game" is sometimes, but not always, a fractal."

the sierpinski triangle (right) is the result of imputting n=3, r=1/2.