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> Glitches

Very curious. Mr. Wolfram and his "rule 30" would probably like a word. Or perhaps it's just integer overflow artifacts. Regardless it's fascinating to see chaotic behavior emerge from something that simple.

Could be nice to see something like that in music visualization. Miss this feature in online music services..
> Here is basically the two lines by which all the artworks below were started from: x += y >> 4; y -= x >> 4;

This is the discrete time version of a Harmonic Oscillator, an energy conserving differential equation. The introduction of nonlinearity results in the complex behaviour.

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BTW, here's Minsky's own application, known as the "Minskytron":

https://www.masswerk.at/minskytron/

(You may set 3-bit wide bit-shift parameters by the switches at the bottom of the screen in groups of 3, one each for scaling x and y parameters of each of the 3 generators/oscillators. There are also a few presets in the menu at the top to select from. Mind that patterns aren't exactly stable for the limited 18-bit word precision of the PDP-1.)

For those interested in the workings, there's a schematic in the description and a link to the annotated source code.