James Gleick's Chaos: The Software | Hacker News Reader

James Gleick's Chaos: The Software

github.com

266 pointssigna1133 comments

I read this as a high school student and saw a presentation on mandelbrot set around the same time. The presenter showed this equation: z = z**2 + c and explained how complex numbers worked. I went home and thought really hard- harder than I had, clearly figuring out some stuff I didn't know before (like mapping a small floating point interval to the "high-res" screen of my apple //e. Eventually I got a working program and started it... and it didn't get very far before I had to go to bed. I didn't even know at the time whether you could leave a computer on overnight- would it overheat? But I did and woke up to... nothing. My BASIC program hadn't gotten to any of the set yet, just the bands around it. At that point, I decided I needed a faster computer and eventually upgraded to a 80286 DOS machine which I think was able to run FRACTINT. FRACTINT was a clever optimization that used integer (which was all my poor 286 could do) and a number of other tricks to speed up set rendering. It was a very useful lesson in how to optimize.

That book, and several others (K&R C, Hackers) helped expand my high school mind and point me in the direction of high performance computing, complex systems, and simulation. The butterfly effect played a huge role in my understand of classical causality.

> FRACTINT

Still available:

https://fractint.org/

Back then I learned C from the source files, until then I had been using a mixture of Turbo Pascal and assembler. Later that led to C++, which was the base language for a large part of my freelance career. Nice to be reminded of it again.

I wonder how hard it would be to get this running in pcjs so it just runs automatically in a browser. I spent hundreds of hours playing with it in the early 90s.

Gleick's "Chaos" got me sent to the principal's office in high school. I went crazy for fractals. Unfortunately all I had at home was an IBM PC XT. Mandelbrot set renderings were agonizingly slow and the CGA palette was too limiting.

Around this time my co-conspirator and I realized the library had 386s that almost no one was using for catalog search. They became our fractal render farm. We'd exit the catalog program, insert a floppy with our latest renderer, kick off a deep zoom, and turn off the monitors to avoid suspicion until we could check back next period. The results were thrilling. What a difference the access to compute made.

You all know the story -- eventually the librarian found us out and reported us for "hacking."

This book changed my life. I was an awful mathematics student in high school, but having a very lukewarm interest in an artistic career I decided to take maths as an advanced subject so that I might pursue architecture or something. I ended up getting a U in my maths exams, which in the British grade system stands for “Unmarked”. I did so poorly that my paper wasn’t even worthy of a mark!

Around the same time, I was wandering around the I saw a book cover with the weirdest, most beautiful looking graphics I’d ever seen. I still remember thinking “What the hell is that supposed to be?” as I picked it up. The copy I held had a colored picture segment as the middle pages with crisper, more mindblowing images. I borrowed the book and started reading it, trying to figure out how those images were drawn.

Long story short, I ended up becoming quite competent at mathematics. Fractals (albeit statistical ones) actually ended up being an important topic in my doctoral research. I sometimes wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn’t seen those weird images - I’d certainly have become a very mediocre architect at best.

> This book changed my life.

Ditto! I thought science was... all about the end state? You mix these two chemicals together, you get these products. You solve a math problem, you get an answer.

The idea that the interesting bit was the process, not the outcome, was a whole new way of looking at the world. It was my introduction to the idea that you could iterate - feed the outputs back in to the function as inputs - and not just get feedback squeal.

How many genuine paradigm shifts do you get in a lifetime? Right book, right age. I bet most of the people leaving comments like this are circa 50 now.

I never became competent at mathematics though :)

It is a brilliant book, first book I bought with my own money college. It makes math interesting and approachable.

>which in the British grade system stands for “Unmarked”.

IIRC it was "Ungraded". But it was a long time ago!

The fact that this is on Rudy Rucker’s github makes it doubly cool. Reading his book “Infinity and the Mind” is what got me to go back to school (as a math major). That book changed my life for the better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker

I'll shout out his book Postsingular, which is a real head-trip and available under a Creative Commons license here: https://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postsingular

I read Chaos while I was in high school in 1987. I promptly fell into a rabbit hole, coding the Lorenz attractor on an Apple IIe at my school.

I was blown away that no matter where I zoomed in, there was more detail. Did humans create those features by inventing mathematics, or did they exist independently in the universe, waiting to be discovered? So many teenage philosophical conversations were prompted by that experience!

The program in Applesoft Basic was SLOW! It's too bad it didn't motivate me to learn 6502 assembly.

After reading the book in high school, I was motivated by the description of the water drop interval timings experiment to try to replicate it with an Apple IIe, a laser and a photodiode. I was getting measurements and almost an attractor, but BASIC was too slow and it motivated me to learn assembly to get the measurements I needed.

I think I basically lost interest in the physics and math and just kept going with computers. Still am, 40 years later!

I loved this book so much when I was in high school. I read it again during college as well. Had a very big impact on me. He’s a really great writer and does a nice job profiling the various researchers and explaining the theory and ideas.

For those who like this domain, the complexity explorer [1] is also a wonderful resource.

[1] https://www.complexityexplorer.org/

Neat!

This was a very influential book to me when i read it as a kid.

One of my favourite books and authors, I gave my copy to my photojournalism tutor after I explained how this book helped open up my mind and related directly to the photojournalism concept of “creating order out of chaos”, which has since become applicable to every part of my professional life!

Need to go dig out his other books and get myself another copy of this. And clone this repo.

I spent a lot of time messing with fractal generators as a kid. Lots of fun. For those interested in similar, newer software:

XaoS, realtime fractal generator / viewer: https://github.com/xaos-project/XaoS

Apophysis 7X: https://github.com/xyrus02/apophysis-7x

Chaotica: https://www.chaoticafractals.com

One of my favorite books. The Information is also excellent. Time to fire up DOSBox.

I recently learned of this new-design PC XT clone motherboard, which comes with a VGA card. I imagine this software is perfect for that system.

https://monotech.fwscart.com/product/nuxt-v2-0---microatx-tu...

Nice moment of nostalgia seeing that. The Chaos book was mind blowing to all of us young math / cs nerds at the end of the 80s.

Spent my Christmas break in college working with an artist coding Mandelbrot drawing routines on a IBM 286 machine. We’d print them out on a dot matrix printer and he’d incorporate them into elaborate collages.

Love too that the author is Rudy Rucker, science fiction writer.

I had a quick play with that program, it's quite fun! I'd have spent hours with it back in the day! :o

But _EVEN_MORE_COOL_ this is Rudy Ruckers github profile! He is one of my absolute favorite authors! Love Gibson and Stephenson and all the rest, but Ruckers "ware tetralogy" is just absolutely completely mindblowingly amazing!

Oh fascinating. This is the sort of stuff that really inspired my interest in computers as a kid of the late 80s. I am sure software of the demonstration sort like this still exists these days but it's far less publicized. I remember watching shows on the Discovery Channel about interesting software as a kid.

OP Rudy Rucker also wrote the book Infinity and the Mind, on the same shelf in Barnes and Noble, another late 20th Century pop math book for nerds, with off the beaten path mathematical content and a not quite accurate perspective on the direction the world of science was going.

Is this where XaoS (long time open source fractal generator) got its name from?

https://xaos-project.github.io/

I was wondering the same thing but cannot find any reference to Chaos in their documentation or forum.

Please do yourself a favor and read some of Ruckers sci-fi books! Live Robots is a great entry

Hey, I’m reading this book currently.

Awesome to come across this lol

Honestly, all you lot complaining about the speed of 286s or 386s!

I have fond memories of implementing a Mandelbrot set renderer on a CASIO fx-7000G graphics calculator. 422 bytes of programmable memory! The TI-93 I did it on later was considerably faster and easier to make it fit in. :-)

Any books on the same topic that anybody can recommend? I've tried a few and was mostly disappointed. I'd like something diving deeper than Gleick.

Ah yes, I remember reading that when it came out and programming fractals because of it while reading.

Oh wow, another awesome thing about John Walker. RIP.

Amazing book

Took a course on this subject during my undergrad and it was so much fun. The textbook we used was Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven Strogatz who himself has written a number of fantastic popular science books.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com