Which you almost had to, so ugly were many of the palettes that people ended up using. It had gotten so bad that it had actually led to a backlash. The trend in the last year or so had been back toward Diane’s palettes. But out of this, it seemed that an even more strange and subtle phenomenon was going on, which was that people were using Diane’s palettes with only small modifications. These almost-but-not-quite Dianan palettes were being posted and swapped on fan sites. Players would download them and then make their own small modifications and then post them somewhere else. Since a color, to a computer, was just a string of three numbers—a 3D point, if you wanted to look at it that way—you could actually draw diagrams showing the migration of palettes through color space. Over the summer, Diane had hired an intern to develop some visualization tools for understanding this phenomenon of palette drift, and then for the last two months Diane had been putting in way too many hours messing around with those tools and sending Richard "most urgent" emails about the trends she’d been observing. Another executive would have reprogrammed his spam filter to direct these messages into interstellar space, but Richard actually didn’t mind, since this was a perfect example of the hyperarcane shit that he would use to justify his continued involvement in the company to shareholders, if any of them ever bothered to ask. Yet he was having a hard time putting his finger on why it was important. Diane was convinced that the palettes were not just zinging around chaotically but slowly converging on one another in color space, grouping together in regions that she designated "attractors" (borrowing the term from chaos theory).