Post 26: Fractals: The Pattern of Chaos book

I wanted to understand more about fractals and nature, so I bought the book Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos by John Briggs. While reading it, I came across this quote from landscape photographer Lawrence Hudetz, “Nature’s order is to be continually rediscovered. That’s why it’s so exciting, because every photograph is brand new. You’re constantly in a different place, a different time. For me, photographs of human objects don’t have this quality of constant rediscovery.” For me, this idea had powerful connections to storytelling. The best stories are the ones that we can read or watch over and over without growing tired. Certain books and films have an endless complexity to them, where each reading or viewing reveals something new. Like patterns in nature, they contain chaos within a seemingly ordered system. The structure of chapters, acts, and plot arcs gives way to the chaos of human emotion and interaction–the tension between the two is what makes great stories stand out. 

Other cool things I noticed in this book:

Briggs writes: “The seemingly endless niches in nature, for example, can now be perceived as an analogue for the intricate complexity which fractal geometers have found in the nooks and crannies of the Mandelbrot set. Indeed, the idea of niche itself can now be understood as a fractal idea.” While not infinite like mathematical fractals, any biological system can be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, within which thousands of individual species have carved out specific roles that, when combined, constitute a balanced ecosystem. Even a single drop of pond water can contain hundreds of different species of bacteria, protozoa, and algae each with a specific niche.

This: point about how birds fly in formation is something that animators definitely would want to know to enable us to create more realistic flight patterns: “For example, the chaotic interaction of birds lifting off from the tops of trees exhibits positive feedback. The birds’ flight patterns are wild and unorganized as they try to avoid crashing into each other in the first moments of flight. As a result, negative feedback loops are created and suddenly the birds; flight patterns become highly organized.” This is an area I want to learn more about– how creatures move and how animators can predict and simulate realistic patterns. 

“By using the iterative features of ‘recursive programming,’ biologist Richard Dawkins has even created a ‘biomorph’ program that simulates evolution. The program iterates genes and occasionally adds copying errors which are compounded over generations to create new computer creatures, some of which resemble the trilobites that swam in the oceans of the Cambrian era 570 million years ago.” The elegant nature of recursive programming lets simple rules be compounded thousands of times until the result is something extremely complex. Add in a little randomness to each rule and you’ve come surprisingly close to mimicking actual evolutions by simulating changes over generations.