Show HN: Inkbrot, a dynamic Mandelbrot set explorer

romankogan.net

1 point·romwell··6 comments

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

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.

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?

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.

Reminded me of Fraqtive (apt install fraqtive).

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.

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