Show HN: Inkbrot, a dynamic Mandelbrot set explorer

http://romankogan.net/math/processing_js/mandelbrot.html

by romwell • 8 years ago

1 6 8 years ago

romwell3• 8 years ago

Disclaimer: currently, this requires a mouse and doesn't work on mobile.

The idea behind this is to create a visualization of the Mandelbrot set that will convey the idea behind it by feel, which static images - even the colored once - don't do well.

sfcguyus• 8 years ago

It doesn't work if you keep zooming in, eventually (after a lot of zooming) it gets pixelated, maybe there's some floating point rounding going on?

romwell3• 8 years ago

Yes! That happens when you exhaust the limits of double-precision floating point, at zoom level 48 (that is, 2^48 x magnification).

One could do better with arbitrary-precision arithmetic, but I wanted to keep the code small and simple - and also thought this is a neat illustration of why double-precision numbers are really not the same as reals.

aruggirello• 8 years ago

Reminded me of Fraqtive (apt install fraqtive).

romwell3• 8 years ago

This is way, way, way simpler than Fraqtive (I wasn't aware of it, so thank you!) - so this would be a compliment.

The novel part here is showing the set as a process rather than a static image; it doesn't seem like Fraqtive has an option to do it this way. There's a way to generate a sequence of images, but it doesn't animate the computation.

jveres• 8 years ago

Awesome! Inspired me to fork it into a colorized version here: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/590540

Show HN: Inkbrot, a dynamic Mandelbrot set explorer

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