I was digging around on the Wayback Machine today, and stumbled across a lost piece of code from December 2004. It’s a Strange Attractor Generator, from the pages of Clifford Pickover’s book Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty (p 165).
As the equation wanders through its orbit, each pixel hit is darkened by a shade. This reveals the features in a way that would have been hidden by a simple drawing of the graph. The only addition I made (beyond introducing the code to Processing) was to enact this process over time, which makes for a lovely sense of a landscape etching its way into existence.
Click on the applet area to generate new, very different orbits. Pickover describes this well:
A “strange attractor” has an irregular unpredictable behaviour. Its behaviour can still be graphed, but the graph is much more complicated. With “tame” attractors, initially adjacent points stay together as they approach the attractor. With strange attractors, initially adjacent points eventually follow widely divergent trajectories. Like leaves in a turbulent stream, it is impossible to predict where the leaves will end up given their initial positions.”
The Wayback Machine is great for HTML docs, but many Java applets and Flash movies have disappeared, vanishing in the uniquely permanent way electronic media can. Processing, however, encourages the source code to be made available and distributed in the act of publishing. This meant the code could be copied and pasted, and run as if it were new.