Strange attractors guide

Overview

Strange attractors draws eight chaotic systems as glowing curves in 3D that you can turn and bend.

A glowing two-lobed loop of dots, like butterfly wings, blue on one side and white and pink on the other, on a dark ground
The Lorenz attractor in Position colours, held still, seen from 110 units away with 20,000 points.

Each system is three short rules that say how fast a point moves in x, y and z from where it is now. A point in that space follows the rules and leaves a path.

For these rules the path never repeats and never leaves one shape. That shape is a strange attractor. The path is chaotic: two starts a hair apart soon take different ways, the butterfly effect, yet both trace the same shape.

The tool moves the point forward a small time step at a time with the Runge–Kutta method, which checks the rules four times per step. Each position is kept as a dot, so the shape builds up as a point cloud.

The eight systems are Lorenz, Rossler, Chen, Aizawa, Thomas, Halvorsen, Sprott and Dadras. Their parameters are sliders, and moving one bends the shape while it runs.

Open Strange attractors Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need, your first shape, and how to save it.
  2. Every controlEvery control in the panel, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree pictures and the settings that made them.
  4. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.

It runs in your browser with WebGL. Nothing is uploaded, and no picture of yours is used. A mouse, a trackpad, a pen and a finger can all turn the view.