Chaos Theory was a concept popularized by the film series Jurassic Park where the 'hero' of the story (mathematician Ian Malcolm) surmised that tiny, unpredictable, immeasurable instabilities in a 'system' (like Jurasic Park) would add up, compounding in such a way as to lead to outcomes beyond anyone's imagination. (Watch a movie clip!)

Another short story, A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, extended the concept of The Butterfly Effect: A butterly flaps it's wings in Peking and changes the weather in New York.

Our app shows how random numbers can be generated in a simple quadratic system using nothing more than the concept of mathematical feedback: output becomes input becomes output becomes input....

Tiny, microscopic changes in the original input produces wildly varying output over time...just by feedback amplification.

It gives one a sense of how pseudo-random numbers could be generated in a computer environment.

Let's step on some butterflies!

Note: If you just can't wait until we finish this saga, we have an older version of Chaos Game in Past Blasts that works but isn't as pretty as it will be in Processing.

Last update: 09/28/25

---