Monday, March 8, 2010

[BLUG] (FLOSS) Graphing Libraries

I’m looking to do some fractal like graphing.  I have two tasks in mind.  The first is a graph the Collatz conjecture mentioned in the xkcd comic from Friday Mar 5.  The Wikipedia article on the Collatz conjecture has some interesting graphs, and I’m wondering if there are any good libraries to help me make something similar. 

 

For the second graph, I’d like see what loops are formed if you start with a given number in the range of the cksum output and use that as the input to cksum.  Eventually this must loop, but there could be many loops.  It think it would be interesting to see what the structure looks like.  If I get this working, I may try md5sum, but that’s a much larger space to cover. 

 

I’m sure I could do this with MatLab somehow, but does anyone know of a good (open) way to show such information?  Has anyone done fun graphing projects in the past and have some insights for me? 

 

 

Jeffery Williams

Software Test Engineer

IU Cyclotron Operations

jefjewil@indiana.edu