Spirals, Snowflakes and Trees: Recursion in Pictures | Hacker News Reader

Spirals, Snowflakes and Trees: Recursion in Pictures

learn.hfm.io

106 pointsnbaksalyar12 comments

If you like playing around with fractals, you'll love playing around with images generated by context free grammars: https://www.contextfreeart.org

Reminds me of https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/computational-beauty-nature

Lots of ways of generating fun pictures in A New Kind of Science (https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/) as well.

i noticed a bunch if spirals demoed seem to kind of twinkle when you scroll the page. is this a known optical illusion?

A Moiré pattern perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern

It's called "limitations of display devices"!

The high contrast of the pictures, modern smooth scrolling, reveals the inherent ghosting (or overdrive) of most computer screens. While decent monitors are usually not noticeable in more regular use-cases, tightly-packed lines are very noticeable.

That means that there is a partially-faded copy of the previous frame still visible for a fraction of a second, which your eye sees, and the resulting image has Moiré fringes because of the mismatching angles.

For example, my monitor shows the purple drawings pretty sharply, but the green or white pictures are very artifacted when moving.

(me again)

Which reminds me of this neat site to visualize these limitations: https://www.testufo.com/ghosting

On the top-right there is a drop-down, try all the options in the "Tests" category! Note it has fast-moving imagery that might trigger epilepsy if you're particularly sensitive.

Is it not due to the inexactness of mapping the image pixels to device pixels? (Similar to what happens when drawing text with antialiasing)?

In principle it could be, but usually browsers snap element rectangles to the pixel, thus protecting against that (have you ever seen a blurry border on a box because its contents had 0.5px size? nope, even though it is annoyingly common in things such as game UIs)

Plus you can see the same effect on the UFO tests, which strictly uses integer positions so pixel misalignment is not a factor.

The lack of whitespace on the left and right sides of the page is jarring.

Here's a better link: http://learn.hfm.io/fractals.html (can't edit it anymore, sorry)

Changed from http://learn.hfm.io/fractals/fractals.html. Thanks!

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