# Compute the bit-length of an integer from bitwise shifts

I recently had to write a simple algorithm that computes the bit-length of an integer (the number of digits in the binary expansion of the integer) given only bitwise shifts and comparison operators. It is simple to compute the bit-length in linear time in the number of digits of the integer by computing the binary expansion and counting the number of digits, but it is also possible to do it in logarithmic running time in an upper bound for the bit-length of the integer. However, I wasn’t able to find such an algorithm described anywhere online so I share my solution here in case anyone else run into the same problem.

The idea behind the algorithm is to find the bit-length of an integer n \geq 0 using binary search with the following criterion: Find the unique m such that n \gg m = 0 but n \gg (m - 1) = 1 where \gg denotes a bitwise right shift. Note that m is the bit-length of n. Since the algorithm is a binary search, the running time is logarithmic in the maximal length of n.

Below are both a recursive and an iterative solution written in Java. They should be easy to translate to other languages.

### Recursive solution

public static int bitLength(int n, int maxBitLength) {
if (n <= 1) {
return n;
}
int m = maxBitLength >> 1;
int nPrime = n >> m;
if (nPrime > 0) {
return m + bitLength(nPrime, maxBitLength - m);
}
return bitLength(n, m);
}


### Iterative solution

public static int bitLength(int n, int maxBitLength) {
if (n <= 1) {
return n;
}
int length = 1;
while (maxBitLength > 1) {
int m = maxBitLength >> 1;
int nPrime = n >> m;
if (nPrime > 0) {
length += m;
n = nPrime;
maxBitLength = maxBitLength - m;
} else {
maxBitLength = m;
}
}
return length;
}


# High resolution fractal flames

Fractal flames are a type of iterated function systems invented by Scott Draves in 1992. The fixed sets of fractal flames may be computed using the chaos game (as described in an earlier post), and the resulting histogram may be visualised as beautiful fractal-like images. If the histogram also has a dimension storing what function from the function system was used to get to a particular point, it may even be coloured.

There are a lot of software available to generate fractal flames, and I have built yet another one focussed on generating very high resolution images for printing. The image below has resolution 7087 x 7087 and been generated after about 4 hours of computation on a laptop. It is free to use under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license.

## References

Scott Draves & Eric Reckase (2003), The Fractal Flame Algorithm, https://flam3.com/flame_draves.pdf

# Using the “Boids” algorithm to compose music

## Simulating flocks of birds

The Boids (short for “bird-like-objects”) algorithm was invented by Craig W. Reynolds in 1986 to simulate the movement of flocks of birds. One of the key insights was that a bird in a flock may be simulated using three simple rules:

1. Collision Avoidance: avoid collisions with nearby flockmates
2. Velocity Matching: attempt to match velocity with nearby flockmates
3. Flock Centering: attempt to stay close to nearby flockmates

Using these simple rules, a very realistically looking simulation of flocks of birds may be implemented. It is usually done in two or three dimensions, but may in principle be done in any space where direction and distance can be defined meaningfully, for example a normed vector space.

## Using the simulation to compose music

We have created a special-purpose version of the boids algorithm to compose music. In this, we limit the boids to move around in one dimension but use the same rules as in simulations in two or three dimensions. Each boid corresponds to a voice and the one-dimensional space is mapped to a set of notes in a diatonic scale. The rules are adjusted such that the collision avoidance prefers a distance of at least a third, but since there are other rules influencing the movement, and only one dimension to move around in, the boids collide often. We also add rules to keep the boids in a certain range. Left on their own, the boids tend to land in an equilibrium, so to ensure an interesting dynamic, we let one boid move randomly with its velocity changing according to a brownian motion (Boid 0 in the plot below) as well as the other rules, the boids are following. With four boids this gives a result as shown below:

The voices are mapped to notes (MIDI-files) and was used in the recording all three tracks of the album “Pieces of infinity 02” by Morten Bach and Jonas Lindstrøm. The algorithm was changed slightly, for example to allow some boids to move faster than others, or to allow more boids, but the base algorithm is the same used to generate all voices for the three tracks.

## References

Reynolds, Craig (1987): Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioural model. SIGGRAPH ’87: Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, https://team.inria.fr/imagine/files/2014/10/flocks-hers-and-schools.pdf

Lindstrøm, Jonas (2022): boid-composer, https://github.com/jonas-lj/boid-composer

# On the creation of “The Nørgård Palindrome”

The Nørgård Palindrome is an ambient electronic music track released recently by Morten Bach and me. It is composed algorithmically and recorded live in studio using a lot of synthesizers. It is the second track of the album, the first being “Lorenz-6674089274190705457 (Seltsamer Attraktor)” which was described in another post.

The arpeggio-like tracks in The Nørgård Palindrome is created from an integer sequence first studied by the danish composer Per Nørgård in 1959 who called it an “infinite series”. It may be defined as

\begin{aligned}
a_0 &= 0, \\
a_{2n} &= -a_n, \\
a_{2n + 1} &= a_n + 1.
\end{aligned}

The first terms of the sequence are

0, 1, -1, 2, 1, 0, -2, 3, -1, 2, 0, 1, 2, -1, -3, 4, 1, 0, \ldots


The sequence is interesting from a purely mathematical view point, which has been studied by several authors, for example by Au, Drexler-Lemire & Shallit (2017). Considering only the parity of the sequence yields the Thue-Morse sequence, which is a famous and well-studied sequence.

However, we will, as Per Nørgård, use the sequence to compose music. The sequence is most famously used in the symphony “Voyage into the Golden Screen”, where Per Nørgård mapped the first terms of the sequence to notes by picking a base note corresponding to 0 and then map an integer k to the note k semitones above the base note.

In The Nørgård Palindrome, we do the same, although we use a diatonic scale instead of a chromatic scale, and get the following notes when using a C-minor scale with 0 mapping to C:

It turns out that certain patterns are repeated throughout the sequence, although sometimes transposed, which makes the sequence very usable in music.

In the video below we play the first 144 notes slowly along while showing the progression of the corresponding sequence.

In The Nørgård Palindrome, we compute a large number of terms, allowing us to play the sequence very fast for a long time, and when done, we play the sequence backwards. This voice is played as a canon in two, and the places where the voices are in harmony or aligned emphasises the structure of the sequence.

The recurring theme is also composed from the sequence using a pentatonic scale and played slower.

The code use to generate the sequence and the MIDI-files used on the track is available on GitHub. The track is released as part of the album pieces of infinity 01 which is available on most streaming services, including Spotify and iTunes.

# On the creation of “Lorenz-6674089274190705457 (Seltsamer Attraktor)”

Lorenz-6674089274190705457 (Seltsamer Attraktor) is an ambient music track released by Morten Bach and me. It was composed algorithmically and recorded live in studio using a number of synthesizers. This post will describe how the track was composed.

The Lorenz system is a system of ordinary differential equations

\begin{aligned}
\frac{\mathrm{d}x}{\mathrm{d}t} &= \sigma(y - x), \\
\frac{\mathrm{d}y}{\mathrm{d}t} &= x(\rho - z) - y, \\
\frac{\mathrm{d}z}{\mathrm{d}t} &= xy - \beta z.
\end{aligned}

where \sigma, \rho and \beta are positive real numbers. The system was first studied by Edward Lorenz and Helen Fetter as a simulation of atmospheric convection. It is known to behave chaotically for certain parameters since small changes in the starting point changes the future of a solution radically, an example of the so-called butterfly effect.

The differential equations above gives a formula for what direction a curve should move after it reaches a point (x,y,z) \in \mathbb{R}^3. As an example, for (1,1,1) we get the direction (0, \rho - 1, 1 - \beta).

In the composition of Lorenz-6674089274190705457 (Seltsamer Attraktor), we chose \sigma = 10, \rho = 28 and \beta = 2 and consider three curves with randomly chosen starting points. The number 6674089274190705457 is the seed of the pseudo-random number generator used to pick the starting points, so another seed would give other starting points and hence a different track.

The curves are computed numerically. Above we show an example of a curve for t \in [0, 5]. The points corresponding to a discrete subset of the three curves we get from the given seed are mapped to notes. More precisely, we pick the points where t = 0.07k for k \in \mathbb{N}.

We consider the projection of curves to the (x,z)-plane. The part of this plane where the curve resides is divided into a grid as illustrated above. If the point to be mapped to a note is in the (i,j)‘th square, the note is chosen as the j‘th note in a predefined diatonic scale (in this case C-minor) with duration 2^{-i} time-units. The resulting track is saved as a MIDI-file.

The composition of the track is visualised in a video available on YouTube. Here, all three voices are shown as separate curves along with the actual track.

The Lorenz system and this mapping into musical notes was chosen to give an interesting, and somewhat linear (musically speaking) and continuously evolving dynamic. Using this mapping, the voices composed moves both fast and slow at different times. The continuity of the curves also ensures that the movement of each voice is linear (going either up or down continuously).

The track is available on most streaming services and music platforms, eg. Spotify or iTunes. The code used to generate the tracks is available on GitHub.

# Turtle graphics

Turtle graphics is a method for generating images from integer sequences using very simple rules. The drawing is done by a “turtle” which moves and draws on a plane according to some rules. At any point in time, the turtle has a position and a direction, but no other state.

For example, consider the Thue-Morse sequence defined by

a_0 = 0, \\ a_{2n} = a_n, \\ a_{2n + 1} = 1 – a_n.

Now define a turtle by the following rules. For each 0 in the sequence, the turtle rotates by \pi and for each 1, the turtle moves ahead one unit and then rotate by \frac{\pi}{3}. This gives the Koch snowflake:

Hans Zantema has written a very nice paper on turtle graphics, including criteria for rules to ensure that the picture drawn by a turtle is either finite or self-similar. The paper also includes a number of examples, including the so-called rosettes which are defined over a binary sequence defined by the morphisms

0 \mapsto 011, 1 \mapsto 0

starting with 0. One example of a rosette is the turtle which for each 0 rotates 7 \pi / 9 and then moves, and for each 1 it rotates -2\pi / 9 and moves. This gives the following picture.

Below is a 6-minute animation of how the turtle moved while drawing the rosette.

The method can also produce more fractal-like images, like the one below which is also from Zantemas paper. Here the sequence is defined by

0 \mapsto 001100, 1 \mapsto 001101

where 0 rotates the turtle by 7\pi / 18 and 1 rotates the turtle -7 \pi / 12.

The code used to generate the pictures and video are available here.

# Visualizing fractals with the Chaos Game

Many fractals may be described as the fixed set of an iterated function set (IFS). Perhaps most famously, the Sierpiński Triangle is such a fractal. Formally, an IFS is a set of maps on a metric space, eg. \mathbb{R}^n, which map points closer to each other.

Hutchinson proved in 1981 that an IFS has a unique compact fixed set S – a set where all points are mapped back into the set. Now, for some choices of IFS on the plane, the set S is very interesting and shows fractal properties. The Sierpiński Triangle is for example the fixed set of the following IFS:

(x,y) \mapsto \frac{1}{2}(x,y),\\ (x,y) \mapsto \frac{1}{2}(x-2,y), \\ (x,y) \mapsto \frac{1}{2}(x – 1, y – \sqrt{3})

A common way to visualise the fixed set of an IFS is by using the so-called Chaos game. Here, a point in the plane is picked at random. Then we apply one of the functions of the IFS, chosen at random, to the point. The result is another point in the plane which we again apply one of the function chosen at random on. At each step we plot the point, and we may continue for as long as we like and with as many initial points as we want.

Another possible fractal which may be constructed as the fixed set of an IFS is the Barnsley Fern. Here the functions are (with points written as column vectors):

\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix} \mapsto \begin{pmatrix} 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0.16 \end{pmatrix}\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix},
\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix} \mapsto \begin{pmatrix} 0.85 & 0.04 \\ -0.04 & 0.85 \end{pmatrix}\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix},
\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix} \mapsto \begin{pmatrix} 0.20 & -0.26 \\ 0.23 & 0.22 \end{pmatrix}\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix},
\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix} \mapsto \begin{pmatrix} -0.15 & 0.28 \\ 0.26 & 0.24 \end{pmatrix}\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix}.

Here, the the probability to pick the first map should be 1%, the second should be 85% and the remaining two should be 7% each. This will yield the picture below:

A more complicated family of fractals representable by an IFS are the so-called fractal flames. For these fractals, the functions in their corresponding IFS’s are of the form P \circ V \circ T where P and T are affine linear transformations and V is a non-linear functions, a so-called variation.

Slowly transforming the parameters in the transformations of a fractal flame can be used to create movies.

Colouring the fractals may be done in different ways, the simplest being simply plotting each point while iterating in the chaos game. A slightly better way, which is used here, is the log-density method. Here the image to be rendered is divided into pixels, and the number of times each pixel is hit in the chaos game is saved. Now, the colour of a pixel is determined as the ratio \log n / \log m where n is the number of times the pixel was hit and m is the maximum number of times a pixel in the image has been hit.

The software used to generate the images in this post is available on GitHub.

# MOSEF – a MOdular Synthesizer Framework for Java

In order to facilitate my experiments with sound synthesis, I have developed a software framework inspired by modular synthesizers, where a synthesizer consists of many connected modules, each with a very specific function. An important feature in modular synthesis is that the output of any module may be used as input in another, yielding endless possibilities in how to setup a synthesizer.

The framework is written in Java, and the core interface of the framework is the Module which has a single method which iterates the module and returns the output:

public interface Module {

/**
* Iterate the state of the module and return the output
* buffer.
*
* @return The output of this module.
*/
double[] getNextSamples();

}


All modules in MOSEF are instances of this interface, exploiting the polymorphism of object-oriented programming to allow the output of any module to be used as input for another. A module may take any number of inputs and give a single output.

A simple example of a Module is an Amplifier which takes a single input, and gains it by a fixed value.

public class Amplifier implements Module {

private final double[] buffer;
private final Module input;
private final double gain;

public Amplifier(MOSEFSettings settings,
Module input, double gain) {
this.buffer = new double[settings.getBufferSize()];
this.input = input;
this.gain = gain;
}

@Override
public double[] getNextSamples() {
double[] inputBuffer = input.getNextSamples();
for (int i = 0; i < buffer.length; i++) {
buffer[i] = gain * inputBuffer[i];
}
return buffer;
}

}


However, this amplifier can easily be changed into an amplifier where the gain is controlled by another Module. In modular synthesis this is called a voltage controlled amplifier (VCA):

public class VCA implements Module {

private final double[] buffer;
private final Module input, gain;

public Amplifier(MOSEFSettings settings,
Module input, Module gain) {
this.buffer = new double[settings.getBufferSize()];
this.input = input;
this.gain = gain;
}

@Override
public double[] getNextSamples() {
double[] inputBuffer = input.getNextSamples();
double[] gainBuffer = gain.getNextSamples();
for (int i = 0; i < buffer.length; i++) {
buffer[i] = gainBuffer[i] * inputBuffer[i];
}
return buffer;
}

}


Note that this a module calls the getNextSamples method on its inputs, so a more complex synthesizer will consist of many modules in a tree structure, where calling getNextSamples on the root module will call all modules the root has a input, each of which will call all modules it has as input and so on.

The framework implements a number of basic modules including

• Mixers,
• Oscillators and LFOs,
• Delays,
• Envelope generators,
• Low pass filters,
• Offsetters,
• Glide/portamento modules,
• MIDI / wav inputs,
• Noise generators,
• Limiters,
• Arpeggiators and sequencers.

The basic modules are available through the MOSEF factory class, simplifying the code needed to design complex synthesizers. For example, pulse-width modulation synthesis where the width of a pulse wave is controlled by a low frequency sine wave may be created as follows. Here the variable m is an instance of the MOSEF factory class, and the width of the pulse wave varies between 0.3 ± 0.1 with frequency 15 Hz.

Module modulator = m.offset(m.sine(15.0), 0.3, 0.1);
Module oscillator = m.pulse(in, modulator);


The framework is available on GitHub as well as some examples on how to use the framework.

# On the distribution of expected goals

## Introduction

I have recently read The Expected Goals Philosophy by James Tippett, where the idea behind “Expected goals” is explained very well. In The Expected Goals Philosophy, the probability that a given team will win based on their expected goals is computed by simulating the game many times, but it can actually be computed analytically which I will do here.

Also in The Expected Goals Philosophy, a phenomenon where a team creating a few good chances will win against a team creating many smaller chances even though the expected number of goals is exactly the same, is introduced and explained. Here I will give a different, and perhaps more rigorous explanation than the one given in the book to this curious phenomenon.

## The distribution of xG

First, lets sum up the concept of expected goals: Given the shots a football team has during a match, each with some probability of ending up as a goal, the expected goals (xG) is the expected value of the total number of goals which equals the sum of the probabilities of each shot ending up in goal.

A shot with probability p of ending up in goal can be considered to be a Bernoulli random variable, so the expected goals of a team is the sum of many Bernoulli random variables, one for each shot. It follows that the expected goals of a team has a Poisson binomial distribution.

Consider the following example from The Expected Goals Philosophy. In 2019 Arsenal played Manchester United. The shots taken by each team and their estimated probabilities of ending up in goal are listed below:

Arsenal shots: (0.02, 0.02, 0.03, 0.04, 0.04, 0.05, 0.06, 0.07, 0.09, 0.10, 0.12, 0.13, 0.76)

Manchester United shots: (0.01, 0.02, 0.02, 0.02, 0.03, 0.05, 0.05, 0.05, 0.06, 0.22, 0.30, 0.43, 0.48, 0.63)

The expected value of a Poisson binomial distribution is the sum of the probabilities of each experiment (shot in this case), so calculating the expected goals for each team is simple: Arsenal has xG = 1.53 and Manchester United has xG = 2.37. But to consider the distribution of who will win the game, we need to consider the probability mass function of the expected goals which, as we saw, has a Poisson binomial distrbution.

The pmf of a Poisson binomial distributed random variable X with n parameters p_1, \ldots, p_n (shots with estimated xG’s in this case) may be calculated as follows: The probability that exactly k shots succeeds is equal to the sum of all possible combinations of k shots succeeding and the remaining n-k shots missed, e.g.

P(X = k) = \sum_{A \in F_{k,n}} \prod_{i \in A} p_i \prod_{j \in F_{k,n} \setminus A} (1-p_j).

Here F_{k,n} is the set of all subsets of size k of \{1,\ldots,n\}. The pmf in this form is cumbersome to compute when the number of parameters (in this case the number of shots) increases. But luckily there are smarter ways to compute them, eg. a recursive method which is used in the code used to compute the actual distribution:

Now computing the probability of the possible outcomes of the game is straight-forward: For each possible number of goals Arsenal could have scored, we consider the probability that Manchester United has scored fewer, more or the same amount of goals. And since the event that Arsenal scores for example one goal and the event that Arsenal scores two goals are disjoint, the probabilities may be summed. Also, the expected goals of the two teams are assumed to be independent, so if we let A denote Arsenals xG and M denote Manchester Uniteds xG we for have:

P(\text{Arsenal wins}) = \sum_{i = 1}^\infty P(A = i) \sum_{j = 0}^{i-1} P(M = j)

Say we consider the event that Arsenal has scored two goals. Then the probability that they will win in this case is equal to the probability that Manchester United scored either a single goal or no goals. These probabilities are read from the above chart and added: 0.04 + 0.19 = 0.23.

This computation gives us the following probabilities for a win, draw or loose for Arsenal resp.: 0.18, 0.23, 0.59. These numbers are very close to the probabilities given in the The Expected Goals Philosophy where they were computed running 100.000 simulations.

## Skewness of xG

In The Expected Goals Philosophy, a curious phenomenon is presented, namely that a team creating many small chances is more likely to loose to a team creating few large chances, even though the two teams’ expected number of goals are equal. In the book, the phenomenon is explained by the larger variance of the former teams xG, which is correct, but it is perhaps more precise to say, that it is due to the skewness of the distribution.

The example from the book is the case where one team, Team Coin, has four shots each with probability 1/2 of ending up in goal, and another team, Team Die Shots, has 12 shots each with probability 1/6 of ending up in goal. Since the probabilities for each shot ending up in goal are the same in the two cases, the xG for both teams are binomial distributed, which is somewhat simpler than the Poisson binomial distribution. A plot similar to the one above looks like this:

Note that Team Die’s is skewed to the right. In general, for binomial distributions, the distribution is symmetric if p = 0.5. But if p > 0.5, the distribution is skewed to the left (because the skewness is negative) and if p < 0.5, the distribution is skewed to the right (because the skewness is positive). In this case, Team Die’s distribution is skewed to the right so it has more of its mass to the left of the mean, meaning that the probability of scoring few goals is bigger than the probability of scoring more. Team Coin’s distribution, on the other hand, is completely symmetric (because the skewness is 0), meaning that the probability of scoring fewer goals than the mean is exactly the same as scoring more. Since the mean of the two are the same, the result is that Team Coin has a higher probability of ending up the winner.

The code for computing the distribution of the outcome of a football game based on the expected goals is available here.

# Algorithmic composition with Langton’s Ant

Langton’s Ant is a simulation in two dimensions which has been proven to be a universal Turing machine – so it can in principal be used to compute anything computable by a computer.

The simulation consists of an infinite board of squares which can be either white or black. Now, an ant walks around the board. If the ant lands on a white square, it turns right, flips the color of the square and moves forward. one square If the square is black, the ant turns left, flips the color of the square and moves forward one square.

When visualised, the behaviour of this system changes over time from structured and simple to more chaotic. However, the system is completely deterministic, determined only by the starting state.

In the video above, a simulation with two ants runs over 500 steps and every time a square flips from black to white a note is played. The note to be played is determined as follows:

• The board is divided into 7×7 sub-boards.
• These squares are enumerated from the bottom left from 0 to 48.
• When a square is flipped from black to white, the number assigned to the square determines the note as the number of semitones above A1.

Seven is chosen as the width of the sub-squares because it is the number of semitones in a fifth, so the ants moves either chromatically (horizontally) or in fifths (vertically). In the beginning, they are moving independently and very structured, but when their paths meet, a more complex, chaotic behaviour emerges.