Thursday, June 2, 2011

The magnetic pendulum fractal - CodeProject

Introduction to Article

A few years ago, I got an article named "Experimente zum Chaos" (translated.: "Experiments on Chaos") from the the German version of the Scientific American. The article dates back to 1994, and introduces among others a simulation showing the chaotic motion of a pendulum under the influence of gravity and three magnets. For some reason, this simulation fascinated me and so I wrote a program implementing it. The original program was coded quite some time ago, and since then I almost forgot about it. But because now I want a high resolution image of this fractal for my wall, I had to recode it. (Stupid reason isn't it? So what!)
I should mention that the calculation takes quite some time, approx. 4-5 hours is not unusual for an image size of 1000 x 1000 pixels using a moderately fast single core processor. So for you people hoping to see an application that provides quick results in real-time, sorry I can't deliver that! Maybe I should give you a brief overview over what you can expect to find here:


The magnetic pendulum fractal - CodeProject
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