Nobody really understood the math, though. The teacher enjoyed it, and the other students liked seeing the pretty pictures. So - I'd start again, and zoom in somewhere else. After about four iterations, though, it would be running too slow to finish a plot in time. My last period was in that class (it was an elective, and one year I took it twice per day just to pass the time and gain an easy "A") - and by that time the new plot would be done and saved. I'd then manually pick some new coordinates, and run it again to "zoom" in to an interesting area. It's one saving grace was that it used a special ML program (something I found in Byte magazine or somewhere) which - on a machine equipped with an 80 column card (and the extra memory it afforded) would enable a high-resolution mode with access to all 16 colors.īy the time lunchtime came around, it would be finished, and it saved the image to the floppy. I load and run a Applesoft BASIC program that plotted the Mandelbrot set - oh.so.slowly. This brings back memories of my being in high school I'd get there in the morning, run over to our Computer Programming classroom, and load a floppy into the one Apple IIe that was connected to a color TV. It is great fun, and I learned a few things along the way. Tackling the Mandelbrot set has the dual advantage of being interesting and you can make pretty pictures along the way. So, the next weekend, I turned my Mandelbrot renderer into a distributed application. Then I remembered an article I had read years before, about the Parallel Virtual Machine, PVM. I rewrote mine after two more years to take advantage of multiple threads and wrote another one to render the Buddhabrot. I have always suspected that it is like a rite of passage, building at least one simple-minded Mandelbrot renderer. (To some, that sounds trivial, but it was something I had never done before.) First in Python, but that was waaaay too slow, then in C, which was a lot faster (duh!), and then I made it even faster by telling the compiler to use SSE. Two years after that, I wrote my first Mandelbrot-renderer. They even have an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot himself, may he rest in peace. Clarke!), with music provided by Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd to top it off, I was tripping on LSD for the first time when I saw it, and I had to rewind at least once to check if something I had seen was actually on the screen or just in my head (to my disappointment at the time, it was actually on the screen). A little more than eight years ago, I came across a nice documentary: "Fractals - The Colors of Inifnity", narrated by Arthur C.
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