Oddities and Curiosities

Yeah, the animation itself just about has to be procedurally generated. The patterns I see when I let my eyes relax makes it look like some sort of tiling scheme, or maybe a few of them with some sort of gently fuzzed transform between them.

It seems familiar, but I can’t recall the source. I want to say that it reminds me of a paper/article about cellular automata, but with the twist that they used real numbers instead of integers (whatever that means). But I’m not at all certain that I trust that memory.

The closest thing I could find with a brief search was “continuous-valued cellular automata”, but this is not a great match:

image

On the plus side, I just discovered that Rudy Rucker has a github account. I don’t know why that surprised me, but I think it’s kinda’ neat.

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It’s a sum of several sine waves going in different directions. But instead of putting them together to get a periodic tiling like squares or triangles, or simply at random, they’ve been chosen to give a quasicrystal – a type of pattern that is ordered but doesn’t quite repeat. I managed to find the source at this blog.

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Thanks for finding that blog! I didn’t know how it was generated, other than it produced a changing 5-fold quasicrystal. I first read about quasicrystals in Scientific American ages ago (maybe an article by Roger Penrose?).

The gif is from LaughingSquid.com. If you blink while looking at it, you can see different patterns appear. Really amazing.

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Damn.

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