Well it's been nearly 20 years since I first began to catalogue these strange attractors - not really been able to explore them to any extend for the last 15 years but the time has come to do something interesting and artistic. The XenoFractals* were derived from an article in New Scientist about symplectic integrators and so far they have three distinct properties:
The first is they product very interesting, biological shapes (see image gallery).
I've catalogued many hundreds of these and they look very similar to Diatoms. Each Xenofractal has deep zoom details - my programming skills were never that great - so a friend (Alex Ryzhanskiy) has coded the iPad application (just sent version 2 to Apple for review).
I've a heap of old code to sift through (Quick Basic) and hopefully we will have a Window 7, Mac and iPad version running in the next few weeks.
Left and right diatoms. These are microscopic particles that form colonies. Below are a series of xenofractals showing the similarity to diatomic patterns.
The second property is that they change state and "grow" on the screen. I'm using the computer as a "virtual" petrie dish and they adapt to the changing environment. This is the most fascinating feature of these fractals as they adapt as they develop.
Xenofractal images.
The third property is that they can be driven with data - the heart rate variability and Forex experiments proved to be very accurate and interesting in detecting chaotic signatures (or lack of as the case turned out to be). Don't trade chaos - it's unpredictable.
G. Keith Still (Jan 22nd 2012)
* I originally called them Orchid Fractals as the first few resembled the shape of the Bee Orchid but the more apt description is Xenofractals as they change state during generation.