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Posted by shashanktomar 5 days ago

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

792 points | 77 commentspage 3
navigate8310 4 days ago|
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.
Loughla 5 days ago||
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.

JKCalhoun 5 days ago||
"IMSAI guy" created a Lorenz attractor circuit [1]. He talks more about it later [2]. I remember seeing the Lorenz attractor on some TV show about chaos.

[1] https://youtu.be/0wD2WbG7loU

[2] https://youtu.be/c14aXxlSxZk

dehugger 4 days ago||
I can confirm that Simone (Maybe) is my favorite :) I especially like looking through them with the color set to Angular instead of Solid, so you can see where the peak acceleration is happening. Makes the big curves prettier :) great project!
alansaber 4 days ago||
I am shocked by how well this runs
grnchdubs 3 days ago||
This is awesome, I often mess with strange attractors in Touchdesigner but its not to do some testing in the browser with this possibly.
vis_lover 5 days ago||
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.

shashanktomar 5 days ago|
Author here, I have tried labeling the "More Information" sections as "AI Generated" where it was directly summarized from the wikipedia article, otherwise most of the post is written by me. I have taken help from AI to fact check and refine few things here and there, but boundaries are so blur now that am not sure if i should label the full post as AI Assisted.
nxpnsv 4 days ago||
This is really pretty. A loong time ago when I wrote a Lorentz attractor on my 486 with turbo pascal and inline assembler, I could only dream of such smoothness back then...
comonoid 3 days ago||
I would suggest to keep initial particles' color -- it would be easier to understand the system's evolution.
Sreenington 4 days ago|
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?
shashanktomar 4 days ago|
Author here, it already supports that for the best attractors. On phone there is a menubar at bottom, on desktop you can’t miss it.
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