Chaos

This weekend I was re-reading John Gleick's excellent book Chaos and was reminded of my youth when a team of researchers and Bristol University were working with the Mandelbrot set as an example of a "highly parallel" problem. The focus of their research was the Inmos Transputer and the Occam programming language. In those days, this was a compute-intensive problem.

The modern-day inheritor of that kind of parallel-programming architecture is the GPU. It occurred to me to try and use a mandelbrot generator as a way of experimenting with low-level GPU programming, but in the end I was more interested in how much more powerful my current Macbook Pro is than all that hi-tech architecture of the late 1980s. TL;DR: you can't believe how much.

Implementation

So I set about building a quick-and-dirty implementation of a chaos field generator. I wanted to go a little bit beyond just the Mandelbrot Set and consider other examples too - such as the attractors for the various solutions to n³ -1 = 0 using Newton's Method.

"Obviously" I chose to do all of this in JavaScript. The main reason being that all the code runs in the browser (using a 2d canvas), and that makes it easy to distribute. Moreover, JavaScript has the ability to plug-and-play with different functions, and I used that to control what you see.

The code can be found in the usual place under the directory chaos, and the "results" are up on my website at http://www.gmmapowell.com/chaos/.

Conclusion

You may be able to, but I cannot believe how much more powerful our computers are today than they were 30 years ago. Things that took forever on the latest, most expensive equipment can now be done in an interpreted language on a regular laptop (or even a phone!).