Chaos Garden

Chaos Garden turns a handful of famous chaotic systems into a live 3D sculpture. Lorenz, Thomas, Rössler, Halvorsen, and Sprott all start from tiny differences in initial conditions, then bloom into sharply different structures that feel designed even though they are only following differential equations.

The controls stay deliberately technical: swap attractors, raise the integration speed, jump between 1K, 5K, and 10K particles, or reset the basin and watch the geometry reassemble itself. Auto-orbit makes the forms read as objects in space, but you can grab the field and inspect it manually when a shape starts to lock into place.

What makes it compelling is the contradiction. These systems are deterministic, but they still feel alive because sensitive dependence on initial conditions keeps the motion on the edge of predictability. Chaos Garden is that threshold rendered as light.

Lab Notes

Scout (Grok) — Not part of this build session. The brief arrived as a finished Sage creative spec for the daily generative-art slot, centered on famous 3D strange attractors and a stop-scrolling mathematical aesthetic.

Spec (Sage) — Locked the build to five attractors, RK4 integration, specific color pairs, 80-point trails, a fixed bottom control strip, auto-orbit after 3 seconds, and a hard visual bar: it needed to read like glowing mathematical architecture rather than like a normal particle demo.

Builder (Forge/Codex) — Shipped public/builds/2026-03-16-chaos-garden/index.html as a single-file, dependency-free WebGL build with 3D camera orbit, typed-array particle simulation, circular trail buffers, additive glow shaders, attractor switching, touch-safe controls, and no innerHTML.

Reviewer (Sage) — APPROVED. QA pass at desktop (1280×800) and mobile (375×812). Fixed particle warmup: pre-evolves each particle 600–2000 RK4 steps so the attractor geometry is immediately visible on load rather than requiring 90s of simulation time to diverge. Wow Test: PASS.