|
| colechristensen wrote:
| Neat!
|
| This was a very influential book to me when i read it as a kid.
| pjs_ wrote:
| Amazing book
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Ah yes, I remember reading that when it came out and programming
| fractals because of it while reading.
| jaybna wrote:
| One of my favorite books. The Information is also excellent. Time
| to fire up DOSBox.
| whyenot wrote:
| The fact that this is on Rudy Rucker's github makes it doubly
| cool. Reading his book "Infinity and the Mind" is what got me to
| go back to school (as a math major). That book changed my life
| for the better.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker
| eigenvalue wrote:
| I loved this book so much when I was in high school. I read it
| again during college as well. Had a very big impact on me. He's a
| really great writer and does a nice job profiling the various
| researchers and explaining the theory and ideas.
| dekhn wrote:
| I read this as a high school student and saw a presentation on
| mandelbrot set around the same time. The presenter showed this
| equation: z = z**2 + c and explained how complex numbers worked.
| I went home and thought really hard- harder than I had, clearly
| figuring out some stuff I didn't know before (like mapping a
| small floating point interval to the "high-res" screen of my
| apple //e. Eventually I got a working program and started it...
| and it didn't get very far before I had to go to bed. I didn't
| even know at the time whether you could leave a computer on
| overnight- would it overheat? But I did and woke up to...
| nothing. My BASIC program hadn't gotten to any of the set yet,
| just the bands around it. At that point, I decided I needed a
| faster computer and eventually upgraded to a 80286 DOS machine
| which I think was able to run FRACTINT. FRACTINT was a clever
| optimization that used integer (which was all my poor 286 could
| do) and a number of other tricks to speed up set rendering. It
| was a very useful lesson in how to optimize.
|
| That book, and several others (K&R C, Hackers) helped expand my
| high school mind and point me in the direction of high
| performance computing, complex systems, and simulation. The
| butterfly effect played a huge role in my understand of classical
| causality.
| mbeex wrote:
| > FRACTINT
|
| Still available:
|
| https://fractint.org/
|
| Back then I learned C from the source files, until then I had
| been using a mixture of Turbo Pascal and assembler. Later that
| led to C++, which was the base language for a large part of my
| freelance career. Nice to be reminded of it again.
| sigil wrote:
| Gleick's "Chaos" got me sent to the principal's office in high
| school. I went crazy for fractals. Unfortunately all I had at
| home was an IBM PC XT. Mandelbrot set renderings were agonizingly
| slow and the CGA palette was too limiting.
|
| Around this time my co-conspirator and I realized the library had
| 386s that almost no one was using for catalog search. They became
| our fractal render farm. We'd exit the catalog program, insert a
| floppy with our latest renderer, kick off a deep zoom, and turn
| off the monitors to avoid suspicion until we could check back
| next period. The results were thrilling. What a difference the
| access to compute made.
|
| You all know the story -- eventually the librarian found us out
| and reported us for "hacking."
| jdblair wrote:
| I read Chaos while I was in high school in 1987. I promptly fell
| into a rabbit hole, coding the Lorenz attractor on an Apple IIe
| at my school.
|
| I was blown away that no matter where I zoomed in, there was more
| detail. Did humans create those features by inventing
| mathematics, or did they exist independently in the universe,
| waiting to be discovered? So many teenage philosophical
| conversations were prompted by that experience!
|
| The program in Applesoft Basic was SLOW! It's too bad it didn't
| motivate me to learn 6502 assembly.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| [delayed]
| vr46 wrote:
| One of my favourite books and authors, I gave my copy to my
| photojournalism tutor after I explained how this book helped open
| up my mind and related directly to the photojournalism concept of
| "creating order out of chaos", which has since become applicable
| to every part of my professional life!
|
| Need to go dig out his other books and get myself another copy of
| this. And clone this repo.
| maurits wrote:
| For those who like this domain, the complexity explorer [1] is
| also a wonderful resource.
|
| [1] https://www.complexityexplorer.org/
| donatj wrote:
| Oh fascinating. This is the sort of stuff that really inspired my
| interest in computers as a kid of the late 80s. I am sure
| software of the demonstration sort like this still exists these
| days but it's far less publicized. I remember watching shows on
| the Discovery Channel about interesting software as a kid.
| lupire wrote:
| OP Rudy Rucker also wrote the book _Infinity and the Mind_ , on
| the same shelf in Barnes and Noble, another late 20th Century pop
| math book for nerds, with off the beaten path mathematical
| content and a not quite accurate perspective on the direction the
| world of science was going.
| yapyap wrote:
| Hey, I'm reading this book currently.
|
| Awesome to come across this lol
| cliffwarden wrote:
| Please do yourself a favor and read some of Ruckers sci-fi books!
| Live Robots is a great entry
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