About this app
As anyone who's seen the 1998 Darren Aronofsky film Pi can tell you, searching for patterns among the digits of irrational numbers is, by definition, irrational - and may lead to a psychotic breakdown. But that doesn't mean you can't look, does it? Why let hereditary decimal bias and basic common sense interfere with your sense of adventure.
If you find yourself agreeing then this free and ad-free app is for you. It reads the digits of irrational numbers and plots - according to its user's chosen colours, dimensions and design - a display of tiles with each tile's colour determined by its allotted digit's value. it's art, if anyone asks.
You can plot out grids of square tiles, a spiral of square tiles or concentric rings or a triangle of circular tiles. The distributions work either left-to-right then top-to-bottom, or clockwise outwards ('direct'), but each has a version which switches direction for every second row or ring ('alternating'). Once completed (if not stopped early) the app will save the resulting portrait of chaos as a .png file to your device, its filename drawn from the settings e.g. PiDecRGB99GA.png (Grid Alternating)
The app contains the following pre-installed, with decimal points removed, courtesy of Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell (NASA's Astronomy Picture Of The Day), Hugo Pfoertner (Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences) and Michael Hartl (The Tau Manifesto) for which I'm duly grateful to all.
1 million digits in decimal of Pi, Phi aka The Golden Ratio, e the base of the natural logarithm and square roots of 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10
100,000 digits of Tau (2 x Pi) in decimal for those who argue the fundamental circle ratio should be circumference/radius
100,000 digits of Pi & Tau in binary (doubling a number in base 2 = multiplying by 10, so Pi = 11.001... Tau = 110.01... etc)
Users can also generate random digits in decimal. You can choose between a spectrum colour scheme or rising shades of blue - tapping the colour chart calls a side panel letting you choose colours for individual digits, including black or white.
The value for x - the digit-length of each grid's side, among other properties - is chosen from between 2 and the pixel-width of your screen (Portrait mode). Smaller grids are re-iterated (e.g. a 4 x 4 grid of 4 x 4 grids, etc) however many powers of x tiles fit onto a single row, up to 12 powers (a 4,096² grid of 2 x 2 grids of 2 x 2 grids of 2 x 2... etc).
The spiral and ring methods use x plus one if x is an even number, so the output of the spiral method for x = 20 would be a 21 x 21 grid and rings around the centre tile using the ring method would number 10 (each new ring containing 6 more tiles than the last). The triangle method takes x as the digit-width of its bottom row, starting at the top with one and adding one to each row going down.
Increasing x for these methods won't alter how the tiles are distributed, just the extent of the visible output. The total number of tiles to be plotted for each method is given above their buttons and counted down after one is selected.
Tapping the box on the right hand side of the panel stops the process; selecting the same or another method will start again from the source number's first digit. The deeper you delve though, the longer the process will take to complete - or restart from, having been stopped - so it will require a great deal of patience as well as no common sense. Away you go!
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
By downloading this Android application you agree to indemnify its creator from liability for the consequences of any employment of said application leading to the user's device ceasing to work, or application of a masonry drill to one or both of the user's temporal lobes. If however you uncover a blueprint for means to travel faster than light, the true face of God or the winner of next year's FA Cup, I want 50%.
Designed using the Droidscript IDE. Source code for the Irrational Behaviour app is available on request.
