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Mandelbrot Set Explorer

Mandelbrot Set Explorer

11 comments

·March 15, 2025

chihuahua

Reminds me of the time I typed in a Mandelbrot Set drawing program on a C-64 back in 1984, and let it run overnight to draw the set in 160x200 with 4 colors. I was amazed that it worked at all.

chihuahua

This is also good, and allows drawing the corresponding Julia set for the point corresponding to your mouse pointer:

https://mandel.gart.nz/

adzm

Make sure you read the technical details as well: https://mandelbrot.site/how-mandelbrot-site-was-built

I was surprised that this appears to be calculated entirely on the CPU via Rust code rather than with a GPU shader. The multithreaded JavaScript is indeed interesting though.

code: https://github.com/rosslh/mandelbrot.site

foo_barrio

Works pretty slick for me. Are you considering adding things like super sampling for anti-aliasing and alternate coloring methods like triangle inequality, etc?

jbentley1

Zoom is jerky and the number of iterations don't automatically scale as I zoom in. Maybe I'm expecting too much for something that runs in the browser but seems like there is room for improvement.

barbs

I think it runs pretty well for something in the browser but I can see what you mean. Is there a decent program that runs efficiently outside of the browser?

fractallyte

How far back do you want to go? Fractint is the grandparent of them all! (https://fractint.org/)

Cross platform, there's XaoS (https://xaos-project.github.io/), Mandelbulb (https://www.mandelbulb.com/), FractalNow (https://fractalnow.sourceforge.io/), Ultra Fractal (https://www.ultrafractal.com/)...

DasCorCor

Nice work - thanks for this! How do I play with multibrot? I couldn’t find the controls for that.

racingmars

I think multibrot here refers to setting the exponent (under "Render Settings") to a value higher than 2.

Loughla

Holy shit. I would've loved this when I was in college and still doing hallucinogens.

Fractals are one of those things that just feel "right". You know?

progmetaldev

Most likely from the way they appear in nature. I was into LSD quite a bit in the early 90's, which is when I got into generating fractals through the DOS Fractint software. I would let the computer render deeper and deeper zooms over time, while also playing with the parameters and formulas.

Under the effects of hallucinogens, I found fractals far more noticeable in nature, especially when looking at trees. The branching from the base, off to smaller branches, out to the leaves. I feel like the geometric patterns that appear are somewhat of a fractal-design as well, even though they tend to shift and "breathe". I still enjoy fractals for the way they can be created through math processes, while also showing up in places within nature where there's not a computer anywhere in sight.