Using Special-Purpose Computing to Examine Chaotic Behavior in Nonlinear Mappings

Studying chaotic behavior in nonlinear systems requires numerous computations in order to simulate the behavior of such systems. The Standard Map Machine was designed and implemented as a special computer for performing these intensive computations with high-speed and high-precision. Its impressive performance is due to its simple architecture specialized to the numerical computations required of nonlinear systems. This report discusses the design and implementation of the Standard Map Machine and its use in the study of nonlinear mappings; in particular, the study of the standard map.