Very curious. Mr. Wolfram and his "rule 30" would probably like a word. Or perhaps it's just integer overflow artifacts. Regardless it's fascinating to see chaotic behavior emerge from something that simple.
(You may set 3-bit wide bit-shift parameters by the switches at the bottom of the screen in groups of 3, one each for scaling x and y parameters of each of the 3 generators/oscillators. There are also a few presets in the menu at the top to select from. Mind that patterns aren't exactly stable for the limited 18-bit word precision of the PDP-1.)
For those interested in the workings, there's a schematic in the description and a link to the annotated source code.
> Here is basically the two lines by which all the artworks below were started from:
x += y >> 4;
y -= x >> 4;
This is the discrete time version of a Harmonic Oscillator, an energy conserving differential equation. The introduction of nonlinearity results in the complex behaviour.
Very curious. Mr. Wolfram and his "rule 30" would probably like a word. Or perhaps it's just integer overflow artifacts. Regardless it's fascinating to see chaotic behavior emerge from something that simple.