Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Order and Chaos

There's a virulent, choking sandstorm today. This has meant that attendance is virtually zero; the only poor saps required to show up are, of course, ourselves. The result is that nothing at all gets done. Not a halfway house where classes are sufficiently quorate to attempt normalcy, it's an all or nothing event, a 1 or a 0, in effect.
The difference between order and chaos is minute. Having a few moments, therefore, I wondered whether it might be possible to generate a fractal in Excel based on a Sierpinski Triangle - the basic idea is quite straightforward,

I tried one, then fiddled with it a bit - this was the result. The simplest way turned out to be to generate a Pascal's triangle then colour in the 1's. leaving the 0's blank using a +MOD operator to generate  0 or 1 based on a simple rule.
Changing the boundary conditions by less than 0.1% caused the entire structure to collapse and the pattern disappeared completely. H'm... Next project - a Mandelbrot set from scratch.
And now for the good news. It's 8:30 in the morning and I'm going home.

3 comments:

  1. Very pretty. See comment on previous post.

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  2. P.S. How nice to have the day off. Everyone stayed home from my place of employment as well. We could all have done lunch. I think Mr. Hyperbole might even have made it. We'll have to do that next time there's a general "dust panic."

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  3. we all could have done with today off as well...

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