From Mladen Rakic:
Generalized version of the smooth step indicator (originally posted here : Smooth Step).
This version is using a property of a smooth step that it can be further smoothed - based on Kenneth H. Perlin's (a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University) idea
*when order 0 is used, it is the same as built in stochastic / 100 (with slowing in stochastic set to 1)
*when order 1 is used, it is the same as the smooth step indicator
*when any higher order is used, it filters further the signal while keeping the values in the expected ranges
Recommendations:
*You can use it in similar ways stochastic
*You can use it in any code that needs to have normalized values as inputs