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.
> FRACTINT
Still available:
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.
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."
Please do yourself a favor and read some of Ruckers sci-fi books! Live Robots is a great entry
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.
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.
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.
Hey, I’m reading this book currently.
Awesome to come across this lol
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.
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.
For those who like this domain, the complexity explorer [1] is also a wonderful resource.
One of my favorite books. The Information is also excellent. Time to fire up DOSBox.
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.
Neat!
This was a very influential book to me when i read it as a kid.
Ah yes, I remember reading that when it came out and programming fractals because of it while reading.
Amazing book