The Chaos Theory Chaos PracticeChaos Theory Chaos Practice
I will be teaching a seminar called Chaos Theory, Chaos Practice as part of the Tufts Summer Accelerator program for high school students from July 10, 2022 to July 22, 2022. Here's the blurb I wro... class ended last Thursday. There were 6 great students, all of whom were very engaged, asked lots of questions, and shared interesting ideas and tinkering.
Several of the students pointed out they liked the simulators I collected for the class, so I thought I would share some here. They should all run in your web browser.
- Recursive drawing tool
- Evolving 2d cars
- Traffic simulator
- Birds flocking (boids) NetLogo simulation
- Ants gathering food NetLogo simulation
- Termites gathering wood chips NetLogo simulation
- Hotelling's law NetLogo simulation
A few additional sites that we did not use in the class but are similar:
- Three layer feedforward network simulator
- An IFS renderer
- Percolation example on NetLogo Web
- A Boids simulator
- Another Boids simulator
- An L-system simulator
- A reaction-diffusion model simulator
My personal favorite is the recursive drawing tool. I managed to get something reminiscent of a Hilbert curve:
…and almost managed a Sierpinski triangle:
Toby Schachman, who built this as his thesis project, has a lot of fascinating work on his web site. Recursive drawing seems to have been inspired by Bret Victor’s work e.g. on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations.
