CHAOS WASHING MACHINES

My apartment comes with a washing machine called, imposingly, a Goldstar Chaos Hi Tech Washing Machine. I thought it was a dryer too but that doesn't seem to be the case. Korean apartments have these alleys between the living areas and the outside wall in which clothes are dried. There are sliding doors between the apartment and the alley, and large windows between the bedrooms and the alley.

I thought I wouldn't have to use it but if the washing machine is also a "hi tech" drier I sure can't find the right combination of buttons.

Not that I haven't looked. I tried to decipher everything with the help of my dictionary and limited knowledge of the hangul alphabet (which includes only a dim understanding of the actual letter order--still working on that). The word pronounced (I think) "saw" is a simple two letter word. But according to my dictionary, it means, "a cow, a bull, an ox" or "dressing, stuffing," "little, few, young" and, finally "small".

I washed my clothes at the "ox" setting several times, each time hoping to conjure up the drier setting. No dice.

Eventually I turned to the internet, where I have been very gratified to learn that this is not just any washer, it really is hi tech. This Goldstar machine is the first washer to use Chaos Theory to wash clothes. Really.

A chaotic washing machine? This is just what Goldstar Co. created back in 1993. It was the world's first consumer product to exploit "chaos theory", which holds that there are identifiable and predictable movements in nonlinear systems. This washing machine is supposed to produce cleaner and less tangled clothes. The key to the chaotic motion is a small pulsator (which stirs the water) that rises and falls randomly as the main pulsator rotates. When released to the world market, it was expected to push Goldstar's share of the annual 1.5-million-unit washing machine market to 40% in 1993, compared to 39% for Samsung and 21% for Daewoo (Goldstar's major competitors). However, marketing is fierce in South Korea and Daewoo argues that Goldstar "was not the first" to commercialize chaos theory. Daewoo also built a "bubble machine" in 1990 which also used chaos theory that was the result of "fuzzy logic circuits." Fuzzy circuits make choices between zero and one, and between true and false. These factors control the amount of bubbles, the turbulence of the machine, and even the wobble of the machine. It is clear that chaos theory has not gone unnoticed in today's consumer world market.

Here is the US patent for it

Since I live not unassociated with the chaos theory most of the time, this machine should fit right in.