Tag Archives: chaos

I was reading io9 the other day and ran across this article about Jared Tarbell’s use of orbits to create art. He has two different variations on the creation algorithm. Variation A uses a myriad of root nodes, each of which follows a vertical path and is orbited by several other nodes. The resulting creations tend to resemble horrid wallpaper from the 60s and 70s. Variation B is more interesting to look at. Its creations are akin to the way a real universe works (using a central node about which all other nodes orbit) and each picture is the summation of 400 years worth of orbits. They’re fun little applets to play with and he includes the source code as well (which I may add is fairly easy to follow). The only thing I wish he’d add is a way to change the number of orbital years in order to simulate varying ages in universes. It’d be interesting to do an analysis on the development of these universes as a chaotic dynamical system.