I guess this is the nerd equivalent to carrying baby photos around and producing them without any provocation, but…
Awwwww, look at the Mandelbrot set my program rendered! Look at its little chubby cheeks and pointy seahorse valleys!
Look, I know that some modern techno-hippie dance-types do take their love of fractals to unnerving extremes, but in their defence: the Mandelbrot set is some seriously profound shit. Up on the screen, it stills even the roaring, gibbering horror and stinging shame of my kludgy implementation. It transcends the hack. My implementation’s glacially slow, but that just serves to build anticipation.
My dad coded a Mandelbrot set renderer some time in the early 90’s with Turbo C on our Amstrad PC1512. The thing had CGA graphics, according to the letter of the standard, but it did have a titillatingly taboo 16 color, high-res mode that was an extension to the standard.
I say “high-res”, but I’m somewhat deflated to report that it was actually 640 x 200 (wikipedia).
The point I’m making is this: the Mandelbrot set was still an amazing thing to see back then, in 16-color 640 x 200, after running overnight.
For a while, in fact, there was talk of getting an 8087 floating point co-processor unit, to speed up those overnight runs.
Here are some things I’d like to see:
- A generalisation of the Mandelbrot set to higher dimensions. Maybe there’s one already?
- To be honest, I knew about this in advance; it inspired me to do my own 2d renderer.
- A GPU-based Mandelbrot zoomer/explorer. Maybe there’s one already?
- This one I didn’t know about, and I’m a little disappointed; I thought for a moment I’d come up with a great idea.
- A retro fractal rendering movement, targeting only antique hardware, but generating images of the highest possible precision. Maybe there’s one already? Google hasn’t found me anything yet.
Oh, and if you enjoy fractals and procedural generation in general, you might enjoy dmytry’s blog Mostly Polynomial.
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