What I’ve been playing with

(Click on the image for a full-size version.)

I first encountered this stuff in my teens, via computer magazines, a friend with shared enthusiasms, and James Gleick’s book Chaos. My first attempt was in BASIC on a Sinclair QL, and very slow; it was nowhere near finished even the following morning. I had a lot of fun creating a faster version in 68K assembler using fixed point arithmetic (16 integer bits, rather more than required, and 32 fractional bits, as I recall).

Since Benoit Mandelbrot’s recent death there’s been a lot of references to it online, and that inspired me to revisit it this weekend. The visible results are above, and my program (still very much a work in progress!) can be retrieved using:

git clone http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/git/mand

Read the README. You will need a Linux or OS X system with the GTK+ libraries installed.