Zach Archer Blog » strange attractor http://blog.zacharcher.com Friend to analog and digital alike Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:24:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Strange Attractors in Flashhttp://blog.zacharcher.com/2009/12/12/strange-attractors-in-flash/ http://blog.zacharcher.com/2009/12/12/strange-attractors-in-flash/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:10:16 +0000 Zach http://blog.zacharcher.com/?p=184 Have you seen (or played) the demo for Polynomial, the space shooter? Quick! Watch the video:

I spent a couple hours generating strange attractors in Flash, just a simple 2D version for now. Click to play:

Here Be Strange Attractors

Click the black region to generate new polynomial coefficients and redraw. You will have to click many times to generate something interesting. That's the nature of fractals, I'm afraid. Some coefficients are automatically thrown out if the drawing exceeds a certain size. Unfortunately, the inverse is not true: the code isn't smart enough to trash any drawings that shrink to microscopic size.

I believe that you can stabilize any coefficients by scaling the values of each coefficient, gradually nudging them larger/smaller until the drawing is stable. I'll try this when I get more time. I've been gung-ho on my first proper iPhone app, trying to finish it before Christmas! Stay tuned...

Also, here's the source code for the strange attractor harness! Enjoy.

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