Hacker News Reader

Comment by ipython | Hacker News Reader

It’s a right of passage to generate the Mandelbrot set. I have fond memories of being handed the scientific American article introducing it- apparently you can download a pdf version here: https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/media/inl...

As a high school student I was fascinated and implemented it on any machine I had access to. I remember being bored in math class and coding it on my TI-81 calculator. That took a while to render in black and white but it did work!

Great memories. Thanks for posting.

View on HN

On a side note, the actual saying is "rite of passage". "rite" as in ritual.

Programming in the built calculator language was worse than hand coding assembly language, due to the tedious input method.

I killed the battery by setting the bailout to a ridiculously high value and forgetting about it overnight.

I still have the calculator, but the memory was cleared at one point. I have been tempted to recreate the Mandelbrot program to show my kids, but I can't bring myself to devote that much of my life to it again.

Me too! I think I used a TI85 or 89 but yup! It was awesome learning how to make them after years of playing with them on Fractint, just zooming around.

I miss Fractint. I spent hours playing with that thing as a kid, with no idea about the math behind it (and no Numberphile to help explain it). So I just zoomed and plotted and got really familiar with which particular SVGA modes I could use and which I couldn't.

I still remember discovering Render To Disk and realizing I could save stuff out and open it up in Rainbow Paint... which has been lost in the sands of internet.

> As a high school student I was fascinated and implemented it on any machine I had access to. I remember being bored in math class and coding it on my TI-81 calculator.

In a recent contract I had very little to do for a few weeks and access to a ~9000 core server cluster and a workload-distribution framework...

Wait! Don't stop, tell us the rest of the story...

The story goes much the same way as the others I suspect, only this one could draw high res images very fast. I learned the maths behind a dozen or so fractal types and various colouring strategies, made some very pretty pictures.

Unfortunately as it was on client time and equipment I couldn't take it with me and it lives on only as a piece of sample code attached to the client's distributed processing framework!

But damn - drawing 38400 x 21600 resolution sets in record time was fun :)

I remember it too. I got the algorithm from some programming magazine, without understanding the maths behind it. I went to the local bookstore in my little town to find books on the topic, but they didn't have any. I envy the kids today who have access to so much resources.

luckily I had a subscription to Scientific American so when I read that article I immediately wrote it up in the language at hand - turbo pascal - which would take overnight to generate a full screen Mandelbrot image - that was about 1987 or so - excellent motivation for young brash explorers who loved the unknown - the algorithm was just easy enough to get working without too much frustration yet capable of generating infinitely beautifully complex views into reality

Thanks for posting the Sci Am article. I discovered Mandelbrot around 1994, and proceeded to program it in QB. Soon after, I found an old Sci Am article sitting around, and it was the one with the Mandelbrot! We almost never bought Sci Am articles, so it was a very pleasant surprise.

> TI-81 calculator

I did one on my Casio FX-7000G. The fun of programming under real[1] constraints!

[1] Yes, yes, it wasn't punch cards or core memory or using a hammer to magnetise rocks...

A right of passage - yes. Another object to render is the Lorenz Attractor - not quite as cool, but interesting in a different way.

I keep reading that the Lorenz can be modeled on an analogue computer, and I want to find an example of how, so I can port it to a synthesizer and listen to it

Here is my collection of Lorenz equation implemented in 140 characters of Javascript: https://www.dwitter.net/h/lorenz My favorite is the flying butterfly with flapping wings.

It's defined as 3 differential equations. So you use some multipliers and summers to calculate those 3 equations and feed those into 3 integrators. The integrator. Outputs are what you plot on a scope or listen to. Use pots for the variable gains in the equations.

Ahhhhhh analog.

I could have written every word of your comment and it would have been accurate haha.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com