Summarizing Qualitative Behavior from Measurements of Nonlinear Circuits. Revision

摘要

The process of exploring the behavior of nonlinear, dynamical systems can be a time-consuming and tedious process. In this thesis, I have written a program which automates much of the work of an experimental dynamicist. In particular, the program automatically characterizes the behavior of any driven, nonlinear electrical circuit exhibiting interesting behavior below the 10Mhz range. In order to accomplish this task, the program can autonomously select interesting input parameters, drive the circuit, measure its response, perform a set of numeric computations on the measured data, interpret the results and decompose the circuit's parameter space into regions of qualitatively distinct behavior. The output is a two-dimensional portrait summarizing the high-level, qualitative behavior of the nonlinear circuit for every point in the graph as well as an accompanying textual explanation describing any interesting patterns observed in the diagram. In addition to the graph and the text, the program generates a symbolic description of the circuit's behavior. This intermediate data structure can then be passed onto other programs for further analysis. (RH)