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Real time zooming within the Mandelbrot set. Can't be done on anything less than a super computer---don't know how many nodes would be needed; the answer to that would be interesting in of itself. Different strokes etc., but that is most assuredly what I'd do.

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It can be done on a moderately powerful GPU these days, but only to about 10x zoom (or maybe less, I don't remember) before it starts to look weird. The main problem is floating point precision (or lack thereof) causing distortion :(

Don't you need increasingly high numbers of iterations at higher zooms as well? I don't know if this is an actual property of the render, but I recall it being an issue the last time I programmed it, even with just double precision floats.

How far?

Real-time zooming on Mandelbrot was already done 20 years ago.

Sure it was using a "trick" in that at each frame only a few vertical and horizontal lines were recomputed, and the others simply re-used from the previous frame but still... (and at every frame each line was guaranteed to be "at most" x frames old).

It looked really nice and it was cool to see a real-time zoom on a Mandelbrot... In the nineties!

It was going for quite a while too...

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