01

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Introduction

Laws of nature, laws of motion

• Particles, systems, states, changes, time
• Mathematics of randomness

Readings

• Freeth, Tony. “Decoding an Ancient Computer.” Scientific American 301, no. 6 (2009): 76–83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26001660
• Rucker, Rudy. “The Wolfram Physics Project.” Rudy Rucker’s Blog (blog). Accessed April 24, 2020. http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2020/04/22/the-wolfram-physics-project/.

Studio

All code files can be found here: https://github.com/jbenno/nyuad_decoding_nature/tree/master/Files/01

Setting up things:

• Basic html, JavaScript, and p5.js (resp. Processing)
• https://editor.p5js.org

The first example

• Recreating a work by Saskia Freeke as seen on the kadenze-blog

Pseudo random number generators and chaotic feedback processes. Some examples:

• Simple Linear Congruential Generator
• Demo for the chaotic feedback process in the LGC
• Illustrating the chaotic sequence of the LGC on a clock face
• xorshift+
• Application: Random walks
  • Simplest code example
  • Random walker with a custom pseudo random number generator (PRNG) instead of the JavaScript random() function.

Chaos and cryptography: Elliptic curves

• Elliptic curve chaos demo

Chaos: The logistic map

• Logistic map demonstrating attractors
• Logistic map - now we allow a long phasing-in so that we can actually see the attractors
• The bifurcation plot showing the chaotic attractors