Fractal (Mandelbrot)

Escape rate, fractal dimension, boundary complexity
topologicaldim 23 metrics

What It Measures

How your signal behaves when fed into the Mandelbrot iteration as a starting condition -- does it escape, get trapped, or linger at the boundary?

Takes consecutive byte pairs, maps them to the complex plane as the parameter c, and iterates z -> z^2 + c starting from z = 0. For each c, it records how many iterations before the orbit escapes (or whether it stays trapped). The distribution of escape times, the fraction of trapped orbits, and the entropy of the escape-time histogram characterize how the signal's byte-pair distribution intersects the Mandelbrot set's boundary structure.

Metrics

escape_entropy

Shannon entropy of the escape-time histogram. Human Proteome (4.21) has the richest distribution -- its byte pairs map to c-values that scatter across the boundary region, producing many different escape speeds. Critical Circle Map (3.27) and Classical MIDI (3.23) are close behind. Fibonacci Word and Logistic Period-2 score near zero: their byte pairs map to a narrow region where everything escapes at the same speed or not at all.

escape_time_variance

How spread out are the escape times? Devil's Staircase (953.8) and ETH/BTC Ratio (951.8) have enormous variance -- their byte pairs hit both deep interior and far exterior of the Mandelbrot set, creating a bimodal distribution. Weierstrass (910.1) follows. Constants and Fibonacci Word score 0.0 -- all their byte pairs land in the same escape-time bin.

interior_fraction

Fraction of byte pairs whose orbits never escape (trapped inside the Mandelbrot set). Earthquake P-wave (0.97) and Bearing Inner (0.97) trap almost everything -- their byte-pair distributions map overwhelmingly to the Mandelbrot interior. Divisor Count (0.0) and Prime Gaps (0.0) trap nothing -- their byte pairs all map to the exterior, where orbits escape quickly.

potential_roughness

Standard deviation of the external-potential field log|z_N|/2^N over non-escaping points, measuring how jagged the Mandelbrot potential is across the byte-pair cloud. Logistic r=3.5 Period-4 (4.00) and Edge-of-Chaos (3.54) score highest — their tightly-clustered pairs sample the filament-rich potential near the set's boundary. Circle Map Quasiperiodic (3.11) and Fibonacci Quasicrystal (2.58) follow. Smooth physical signals saturate at the low end: PID Controller (0.008), ETH/BTC (0.008), Devil's Staircase (0.008). Correlates +0.88 with Lorentzian:spacelike_fraction — both proxy the "acausal jump rate" of the byte sequence. Chaos (1.96) and binary (1.95) domain means lead; climate (0.28) and astro (0.36) trail.

Atlas Rankings

escape_entropy
SourceOriginValue
Noisy Period-2iterated-maps3.4422
GUE Spacingsrandom-matrix-quantum3.4236
GOE Spacingsrandom-matrix-quantum3.3505
···
Thue-Morsesymbolic-dynamics-0.0000
Pell Wordsymbolic-dynamics-0.0000
Collatz Cycle Wordnumber-theory-0.0000
escape_time_variance
SourceOriginValue
Spectral Form Factorrandom-matrix-quantum925.5001
Halvorsen Attractorcontinuous-flows914.4082
Ruelle-Takens Cascadecontinuous-flows911.8885
···
Pell Wordsymbolic-dynamics0.0000
Penrose Substitutionsymbolic-dynamics0.0000
Gap-Word β-Shiftsymbolic-dynamics0.0000
interior_fraction
SourceOriginValue
Stable Noisestochastic-process0.9980
Student-t Noisestochastic-process0.9937
MFPT Inner Loadedmachine-vibration0.9816
···
DNA Thermusgenomic0.0000
DNA Centromeregenomic0.0000
DNA Plasmodiumgenomic0.0000

When It Lights Up

Fractal (Mandelbrot) is most discriminative for signals whose byte-pair distributions straddle the Mandelbrot set boundary. The escape_entropy metric uniquely identifies Human Proteome at the top -- its amino-acid-derived byte distribution intersects the cardioid boundary in a way no other natural signal does. The interior_fraction metric cleanly separates physical sensor data (seismic, bearing vibration -- high interior fraction) from number-theoretic sequences (prime gaps, divisor counts -- zero interior), reflecting how their value distributions cluster in the complex plane.

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