Chaos Downloads from Rudy Rucker's Wesbsite

Chaos Downloads

This is a shareware release of James Gleick's CHAOS: the Software. The software was written by Josh Gordon, Rudy Rucker and John Walker for Autodesk, Inc., with Josh Gordon doing the lion's share of the programming work. It is our hope that this shareware release will allow educators, students and dabblers to freely use our software.

We provide both the complete executable and the source code for the legendary 1990 Autodesk release based on James Gleick's wonderful book Chaos. The program runs under Windows as a full-screen DOS session. Great for classroom use or individual exploration. You run the program by clicking on CHAOS.BAT inside Windows explorer. The program then "shells out" to a DOS session and shows a start screen that lets you choose among six modules:

A very fast Mandelbrot set program, incorporating: quadratic and cubic Mandelbrots, various fill patterns, quadratic and cubic Julias, and the gnarly "cubic Mandelbrot catalog" set I call the Rudy set. The image in the background of this page is the RHORSE.FRP parameter set for the Rudy set.

A Pendulum and Magnets program showing chaotic physical motion.

A Strange Attractors program showing some of the Hall of Famers as the Lorenz Attractor, the Logistic Map, the Yorke Attractor, the Henon Attractor, etc.

A "Chaos Game", which is a Barnsley Fractals program showing Iterated Function System fractals such as the famous "fern".

A "Toy Universes" program that shows some cellular automata.

A "Fractal Forgeries" program that shows mountain ranges based on random fractals.

The software was originally released by Autodesk, Inc., in 1990, and was placed in copyright to Autodesk at that time. When the product went out of print in about 1992, Autodesk transferred intellectual property rights for the product to James Gleick. As shareware, CHAOS may be freely distributed, but any commercial use should be approved in writing by James Gleick. This shareware release has been prepared by Rudy Rucker.

We would be interested in hearing from anyone interested in funding, or working on, a Windows or Java port and new shareware or commercial releases of the program.

Download the CHAOS executables and support files. (chaos.zip, 800K). Posted December 15, 1998. After downloading the chaos.zip file, unzip the chaos.zip file. It will create a Chaos directory and copy all the executables and support files into the directory.

As well as releasing the executables, we are releasing the source code as well. This code is DOS and assembly code written to work with a DOS GUI called Metashel. What may be of use is that the original algorithms for our rules can be found within the code. Happy hacking.

Download the C and assembly language source code for the CHAOS program. (chaossrc.zip, 1 Meg).

After downloading the chaossrc.zip file, unzip it into your Chaos directory. The file will create a ChaosSrc subdirectory with subsubdirectories including Josh Gordon's release-version source code for each of the CHAOS modules.

Note for users of Windows NT. When exiting a module of the CHAOS program, press Alt-X followed by Y for yes to get out to the CHAOS start screen, just as is customary. At this point you would expect to press Alt-X to exit the program. (This move works in Win95, but not in WinNT.) But in WinNT, you should instead press Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up a Windows NT Security dialog. Press T for Task Manager. The dialog will disappear, and the CHAOS start screen will briefly reappear. Wait for a few seconds and then the Windows NT Task Manager will appear. Highlight the DOS CHAOS application and select End Task. Wait a few seconds for the task to terminate.