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Show HN: Strange Attractors (blog.shashanktomar.com)

804 points by shashanktomar ↗ HN
I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js.

Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun.

My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to 3D, not sure if it’s mathematically correct, but it’s the coolest by far. I have left all the params configurable, so give it a try. I called it Simone (Maybe).

If you like math-art experiments, check it out. Would love feedback, especially from folks who know more about the math side.

51 comments

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Grosvenor
This is so cool. Back in highschool during the Jurassic age I used ti play with attractors a lot. Unfortunately on a 486 it took 20-30 minutes to draw one even at low resolution. This renders in realtime and in 3D. Great work!

Still they've had a strong impact in how I see systems - orbits, instability, etc.

mcswell
If that was in the Jurassic, I guess I went to high school in the Cambrian. But hey, I like trilobites!
cs702
Beautiful.

Thank you for sharing this on HN.

Loughla
I got really into fractals and attractors when I was also really into mushrooms, lsd, and dmt during my graduate studies.

It actually shaped my post doc work quite a bit and shifted my focus from individual classroom education to strategic systems analysis of entire university and k-12 institutions. Somewhere along the way, a switch flipped and allowed me to view complicated hierarchies like college systems as 2-d fractal geometry in my mind. I can't really explain it, but now that I consult, I can feel when a department is broken before I can prove it with data. It's like they don't fit or reflect the main structure of the institution.

I would not suggest taking this route though. Maybe just take some graduate courses or something.

Fun fact, though, defending your dissertation to a room of around 200 people while still feeling the effects of dmt is a really good way to induce a panic attack. Source: it's me. I'm source material.

orzig
Hobbyists hacking around and sharing their art, best part of the Internet!
vis_lover
Super cool visulitations.

Side note: Did anyone else know it was AI before reading the post? Mathematicians would be argent enough to assume the name was enough, displaying the algo when clicking the name was the give away.

cableclasper
Visualizations like this truly highlight how much there is to be gained from viewing the 3D phase space, but also how much richness we miss in >3D!

(I wonder if there are slick ways to visualise the >3D case. Like, we can view 3D cross sections surely.

Or maybe could we follow a Lagrangian particle and have it change colour according to the D (or combination of D) it is traversing? And do this for lots of particles? And plot their distributions to get a feeling for how much of phase space is being traversed?)

This visualization also reminds me of the early debates in the history of statistical mechanics: How Boltzmann, Gibbs, Ehrenfest, Loschmidt and that entire conference of Geniuses must have all grappled with phase space and how macroscopic systems reach equilibrium.

Great work Shashank!

slicktux
Lorenz Equations and Chua Circuits probed with an analog oscilloscope is mesmerizing! Great videos of a Chua Circuit being probed with an analog scope… Also, plugging the circuit to a speaker via AUX port gives white noise ;)
pkspks
This is absolutely stunning. Wonderful some function of the state of a point can give it colour.
jerf
"not sure if it’s mathematically correct,"

There isn't always "a" correct extension into higher dimensions. There may be many, there may be none, and either way something "close enough" may well be interesting in its own right.

If you'd like something concrete to poke at you can try searching around for people's adventures in trying to make a 3D Mandelbrot. I've seen a couple of good write-ups on those adventures. I don't know if anyone has ever landed on a "correct" solution, it's been years since I last looked, but certainly some very interesting possibilities have been found.

Xophmeister
Neat :) When I was a teenager, some 25+ years ago, I wrote a chaotic attractor visualiser like this — but only in 2D — and it occurred to me, “What if instead of visualising it, I rendered it to audio?” I don’t remember the details: I think frequency was correlated with polar angle and amplitude to magnitude. It forced me to learn how to write WAV format — which was my first introduction to endianness — but the result wasn’t completely inaudible! A bit like the sound effects for computers in old sci-fi movies; random(ish) but not discordant beeps and boops!
metacortexx
Love seeing projects like this, just pure curiosity, creativity, and fun
Figs
The demo makes some nice spirals on the ends. They look like galaxies with the rendering.

It reminded me of one of my (cranky) musings from back in college about galaxy formation and whether they were more like tossed pizzas (i.e. spreading out) than like whirlpools getting sucked in.

aniijbod
I don't care about the math, the computation, the physics. This is just by far the most beautiful thing(s) I have ever seen.
neilpmas
Well that's my productivity blown for the day. Love it.
srvmshr
Coincidentally enough, I dug out my 11th grade CS project on generating fractals from 2002 & modernized it using SFML graphics lib just this week.

https://github.com/gradientwolf/fractals_SFML

Your post gives me so much joy. These tiny little things take me back to teenage years, simpler times & when interests were different. (I put a little note as "why" in my GH repo readme)

navigate8310
The way you explained the mathematical theory was very intuitive and refreshing. It would be every interesting to read if you could also write more on other topics of your interest.
felipelalli
I have no idea what is this, but it's beautiful.
imoverclocked
Reminds me of the xscreensaver, “strange” :)
Sreenington
this is so cool! would be awesome if you can add params to mess with a and b value so we can "find" our own strange attractor patterns. maybe a free mode?