I found an alorithm that produces a puzzling pattern (video)

2    23 Oct 2016 18:10 by u/JaumeRibas

I apologize for my English, I'm not a native speaker.

The algorithm is explained here

This is how it looks like when the initial value is 10000

But the puzzling pattern appears when a larger initial value is used. Here is a 'slice' of the grid when the initial value is 20 million (wait a little for the pattern to show up)

(The video stops before the algorithm reaches the end)

Here is a closeup of the same pattern at a slower frame rate: 20 million closeup

If that wasn't enough, I noticed that if I used a different color map, a new pattern was revealed at the center of the grid. Here is the same algorithm with initial value 100 billion using a different color map

If you want to reproduce the results here is a console app with source code

I'm completely clueless about this. I just wanted to share my findings and know what you think about it.

3 comments

1 u/omegletrollz 23 Oct 2016 22:20

what you think about it

Nothing special. If you take a look at the xscreensaver package and related ones like xscreensaver-gl and xscreensaver-gl-extra you'll see there are many algorithms that produce interesting and unique patterns. projectM is the same but applied to music visualization - based on the much older MilkDrop project, which had thousands of visualizations developed over the years.

My point is there's nothing abnormal in your videos except the human mind being greatly interested in trying to make sense out of random patterns and the human spirit liking to look at those oh-so-satisfying, slowly-evolving abstract animations. If you think that is something you'd like to continue working on I'd suggest taking a look at those cool open-source projects I mentioned. The first video would make a pretty cool screensaver and projectM deserves a ton more visualizations than it has today, if you'd like to help!

EDIT I'm on Linux but projectM works on many audio players like Amarok and Clementine, which run on any major OS. xscreensaver seems to have a Windows port at least but I doubt it's much used. Saying that in case you're running Windows of Mac.

0 u/J_Darnley 25 Oct 2016 02:02

Oooh, GPLv3, very nice. I think I'll see what's going on here tomorrow.