Saturday, April 12, 2008

Diagram week, day 4: Hulk special edition

A special look at graphically representing the Hulk's power.

As we all know, the madder the Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. But is it possible to express this mathematically? For ease of graphing, we'll make the assumption that rage=0 is the point where Bruce Banner transforms into the the Hulk! Likewise, anything below 0 on the x-axis is puny Banner territory.


Firstly, lets take a direct, 1:1 relationship between rage and strength. In this diagram, the madder Hulk gets, he equally gets strong. Twice as mad=twice the property damage. Of course, the problem with this is that it's far too slow. Hulk's poweer ramps up at a much higher speed than that.



Here we have a linear but faster graph. Hulks power is now twice his rage. So if he's two times as angry, he's now four times as destructive. But this still isn't enough to count for the really high end Hulk smashings.


Ah, a parabolic curve! Now we're talking! Geometric increase in strength! Three times the rage for nine times the strength! The only problem is...the -x axis. If we take a rage^2 approach, Banner is just as strong as Hulk, which isn't right at all.


Ah-ha! A rage^3 graph! Better, better. It still increases rapidly on the +x axis, which is good. And it doesn't show Banner getting ludicrously strong on the -x axis which is also good. However, the Banner side of things doesn't really make sense. Banner doesn't get weaker the happier he is. An -x axis would have to hover around zero, and not continue to drop off.


Now, this makes a certain amount of sense! It's a logarithmic graph (kinda). Hulk's power rapidly ramps up with rage, and Banners doesn't dramatically drop off. The final equation? logstrength=0.2rage-1

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