Vector Imagery

Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: Ah, yes, to play search and replace myself the really correct URL is http://frank.harvard.ed/~paulh/misc/lorenz.htm I had to type that 4 times before I finally left the "l" off the end! The Lorenz equation is remarkable for it's conciseness. I recall that when I first learned about it (late 80's?) I was told that it was originally intended to model some sort of atmospheric or gas flow phenomena. As a practical matter you can get nearly the same chaotic behavior with less expensive circuits that have the right kind of nonlinearities. In my implementation the most expensive components were the ten-turn pots and the turn-counter knobs to set the parameters. I think MPY634's are $10 a pop, but that there are some AD parts that are equivalent and slightly cheaper. There are some even simpler circuits that produce chaotic behavior using just diodes and inductors and capacitors. One of these is often called "Chua's circuit" or "Chua's diode" if you want to go googling. I highly recommend it! Historically a lot of chaos research even in the 80's was in fact done with analog computers. It certainly is more fun to move wires around a plugboard and tweak knobs and see the result on the scope, as compared with editing computer code or point-and-drool with a mouse and then running it and then seeing the picture! Tim.