A GALLERY OF CHUA ATTRACTORS: PART III

Abstract

The visualization of patterns related to chaos is a challenge for those who are part of today's dynamical systems community, especially when we consider the aim of providing users with the ability to visually analyze and explore large, complex datasets related to chaos. Thus visualization could be considered a useful element in the discovery of unexpected relationships and dependencies that may exist inside the domain of chaos, both in the phase and the parameter spaces. In the second part of "A Gallery of Chua attractors", we presented an overview of forms which can only be produced by the physical circuit. In Part III, we illustrate the variety and beauty of the strange attractors produced by the dimensionless version of the system. As in our earlier work, we have used ad hoc methods, such as bifurcation maps and software tools, allowing rapid exploration of parameter space. Applying these techniques, we show how it is possible, starting from attractors described in the literature, to find new families of patterns, with a special focus on the cognitive side of information seeking and on qualitative processes of change in chaos, thus demonstrating that traditional categories of chaos exploration need to be renewed. After a brief introduction to dimensionless equations for Chua's oscillator, we show 150 attractors, which we represent using three-dimensional images, time series and FFT diagrams. For the most important patterns, we also report Lyapunov exponents. To show the position of dimensionless attractors in parameter space, we use parallel coordinate techniques that facilitate the visualization of high dimensional spaces. We use Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Mahalanobis Distance to provide additional tools for the exploration and visualization of the structure of the parameter space.