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Hi fractal lovers,

I am not sure if it is appropriate in this category because it is a simulation.

I made this fractal using a program of simulation of physics : Phun .

This fractal is simply generated using law of gravity!

How it is made :

I spaced at equal distance many hundred of littles circles.

I made all those circles attract each other, like if they where planets.

I putted a tracer on each of them to see where they passed.

Lunched the simulation and watch them groups together!


Try it yourself :

You can watch my video on YouTube on how I made it, steps by steps and see the fractal growing.
( full screen in HD is better to see details )

"http://www.youtube.com/v/m4iz0rIKMdw?fs=1&hl=fr_FR&hd=1"

Here you can download Phun.

http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Download

With this link you can try live this fractal in Phun

http://www.algodoo.com/algobox/profile.php?id=2866




I also putted this video in '' Let's collaborate on something!''

My wish is to see this fractal in 3D.

Instead to be only a 2D circle of little circles, it could be a sphere of spheres .

I hope to find here someone familiar with blender or maybe a other way of programing it.



Thank you for watching :)

Hi. Funny video. However I'm not sure if it can be really qualified as a fractal in terms of processing, even if the final results lloks like a fractal. This is because a fractal is generally a process where you start from the "bottom", then do subdivisions (or iterations) to create the final structure. Here you are doing it the opposite way, meaning that you can't easily add as many iterations as you want, because you would have to manually position an exponentially growing number of circles. Anyway the idea is interesting.

I am not sure a fractal have to start from the bottom and increase in subdivisions.
For example, I believe the Mandelbrot set is all there at the same instant, but, because we can not calculate to infinity we have to limit the iterations.So in this case I don't think there is beginning or end to this fractal, or even the notion of subdivisions.
If you look how the DNA become a chromosome you can see it start in parts and become a whole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kQpYdCnU14

I can increase the iterations by increasing the number of initial circles.
In the video, you can see that it is very easy to add as much circle I want. They place themselves side by side.
I could also make a simple equation to place equally those circles at equal distances.


What I like in this ''fractal'' is that the notion of chaos is the base of it existence.
Without chaos or incertitude, all the circles would converge to the centre in a straight line.
But because we can not determine with a infinite precision the position of the object, one circle will be more attracted to the left or right, and follow a chain reaction!

I like a lot your explanations, and the video you posted. Yes, fractals are everywhere!

BTW, Welcome to the forum! :)

Very interesting, and of course there is no order to fractals in the sense of development. In my opinion they are the product of an iteration process. The perfect platonic forms are in this view special fractals, being limit surfaces or limit forms.

The natural plant forms are in exact reverse to the development of plant forms by cell division. This is because among other things natural fractals are a combination of internal and external iterations and boundary conditions.

The mandelbox is probably your best bet at getting a 3d version of this.

Yes welcome to the Forum

Thank you for the welcome, I am very happy to have found this forum! :)

I don't know well Mandelbox, but I imagine more making this fractal in 3D with real time physics with a evolution in time instead of a instantaneous fractal with a complex formula. But it could also be very nice to find the simplest formula that could make the same shape that gravity make. But I imagine this could need a very good brain.

@allisone

to your signature,

ist it more like:

Life is fractal,
more you are zooming to find the object, the more it distracts into smaller ones,
so you find that the object is far more complex than you thought...

Hi Trifox,

maybe we could argue on my signature in the topic I created recently :

Real World Examples & Fractical Applications - Philosophy - Buddhism, science and fractals

It is my answer to you affirmation.

 ^-^

AllIsOne, what a great find, and it is a fractal in my books, really cool. It reminds me of diffusion limited aggregation a bit (should find on google). If you know any programming then evalDraw is a quick way to program such a gravity system.
I think you could also get a tree if the points started at random positions. It makes me think how the creation of the earth must have been a tree... lots of tiny bits of dust into bigger stones, then these collecting into rocks etc...

Ace stuff, combining physics and fractals!

I wonder if most fractals in nature do this kind of "backwards fractal" thing too - it seems a lot simpler in many respects even though I haven't really ever seen it before!

Interesting idea and nice fractal tree !
The process looks like Diffusion Limited Aggregation (DLA) but not quite:
- It is not simple diffusion but attraction
- objects aggregate into clusters and clusters aggregate into bigger clusters, iteratively. 

Now you should try this :
Give some diameter to your objects and place them at random, wait until they all aggregate into one cluster. That cluster is fractal and its dimension should be around 1.4 (Cf B. Sapoval)