Dave Cormier’s Presentation this week reminded me of a wonderful game I like to play with my students.  I call it the Chaos Game, but technically it is called Shirpinski’s Triange. If you haven’t done it before it is great fun, and a good party trick (well, I guess that depends on who you party with!).

You will need:

Pencil, paper and one die, a rule is good too.

Draw a triangle that takes up your who paper.

Lable the corners A B C starting at the top.

A = 1 or 2

B = 3 or 4

C = 5 or 6

Draw a dot anywhere inside your triangle.

Then roll the die.

If you roll a 3 you will draw an imaginary line between your first dot and the corner marked B.

Then make a new dot HALF WAY along that line.  Roll again.

If you roll a 1 this time you will draw an imaginary line between your new dot and the corner marked A.

Then make a dot half way along that line.

Keep going.

Chaos right?

Now, take advantage of super computing power offered at this site and see what happens if we continue with 100 dots, 500 dots, 1000, etc.  A miracle!

http://www.geoastro.de/ChaosSpiel/Spiel1English.html