Customer Reviews

Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos/Book and Disk

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In many ways, people largely stopped writing interesting programming books about ten years ago, once so much software became available to do so many jobs without us needing to be aware of the painful yet interesting details. This is a long out-of-print book on fractals that merges math, programming, music, and art into one interesting volume. And the kicker is that it cost me a tiny fraction of books that I have from the last couple of years that deliver little insight and page after page of application screen shots.

The book's main topic is producing art and music through that class of fractals known as strange attractors. Thus this book isn't your typical book on fractals that goes into the usual well-known fractal patterns. At the end of the day, you should know enough to produce an unlimited variety of patterns that in turn produce both visual and musical art. There is sufficient math in this book to understand the subject, but there is nothing beyond algebra. Although the book has many programs in it, the author is not assuming that you are an expert programmer. Because this book is 14 years old, the programs are in the BASIC programming language. However, the author has thoughtfully provided equivalent programs in C in one of the appendices. He has still another appendix that gathers together all of the mathematical equations discussed in the book. The book has numerous programming exercises, and so the appendix also has all of the programs that should result if you have done your work correctly. I'd recommend this book to anybody interested in computer generated art and music. The following is the table of contents:

CHAPTER 1: ORDER AND CHAOS
Predictability and Uncertainty; Bucks and Bugs; The Butterfly Effect; The Computer Artist;

CHAPTER 2: WIGGLY LINES
More Knobs to Twiddle; Randomness and Pseudo-randomness; What's in a Name?; The Computer Search; Wiggles on Wiggles; Making Music;

CHAPTER 3: PIECES OF PLANES
Quadratic Maps in Two Dimensions; The Butterfly Effect Revisited; Searching the Plane; The Fractal Dimension; Higher Order Disorder; Strange Attractor Planets; Designer Plaids; Strange Attractors that Don't; A New Dimension in Sound;

CHAPTER 4: ATTRACTORS OF DEPTH
Projections; Shadows; Bands; Colors; Characters; Anaglyphs; Stereo Pairs; Slices;

CHAPTER 5: THE FOURTH DIMENSION
Hyperspace; Projections; Other Display Techniques; Writing on the Wall; Murals and Movies; Search and Destroy;

CHAPTER 6: FIELDS AND FLOWS
Beam Me up Scotty!; Professor Lorenz and Dr. Rössler; Finite Differences; Flows in Four Dimensions; Strange Attractors that Aren't; Doughnuts and Coffee Cups;

CHAPTER 7: FURTHER FASCINATING FUNCTIONS
Steps and Tents; ANDs and ORs; Roots and Powers; Sines and Cosines; Webs and Wreaths; Swings and Springs; Roll Your Own;

CHAPTER 8: EPILOG
How Common is Chaos?; But is it Art?; Can Computers Critique Art?; What's Left to Do?; What Good is it?;

APPENDIXES
A. Annotated Bibliography
B. BASIC Program Listing
C. Other Computers and BASIC Versions
D. C Program Listing
E. Summary of Equations
F. Dictionaries of Strange Attractors