I've "wasted" happy hours with this. Wrote a post about it when I was writing a blog for the Norwegian national math education center: http://www.matematikksenteret.no/content/2159/Collatz-formodning-The-Collatz-Conjecture I'm re-inspired by those pics! Gonna fire up Processing now and play... maybe find a new way to visualize, maybe just find a new way to lose a few hours...
That second graph is so cool! I decided to make my own real quick: matrix = numpy.zeros(10000) for i in range(1, 10000): counter = 0 pos = i while pos != 1: if pos % 2 == 0: pos = pos / 2 counter = 1 else: pos = pos*3 1 counter += 1 matrix[i] = counter print(i, counter) matplotlib.pyplot.figure(figsize = (20,10)) matplotlib.pyplot.scatter(range(1, 10000), matrix[1:10000], s=1) (Gotta love Python eh!)
import numpy, matplotlib.pyplot