It’s a right of passage to generate the Mandelbrot set. I have fond memories of being handed the scientific American article introducing it- apparently you can download a pdf version here: https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/media/inl...
As a high school student I was fascinated and implemented it on any machine I had access to. I remember being bored in math class and coding it on my TI-81 calculator. That took a while to render in black and white but it did work!
Programming in the built calculator language was worse than hand coding assembly language, due to the tedious input method.
I killed the battery by setting the bailout to a ridiculously high value and forgetting about it overnight.
I still have the calculator, but the memory was cleared at one point. I have been tempted to recreate the Mandelbrot program to show my kids, but I can't bring myself to devote that much of my life to it again.
Me too! I think I used a TI85 or 89 but yup! It was awesome learning how to make them after years of playing with them on Fractint, just zooming around.
I miss Fractint. I spent hours playing with that thing as a kid, with no idea about the math behind it (and no Numberphile to help explain it). So I just zoomed and plotted and got really familiar with which particular SVGA modes I could use and which I couldn't.
I still remember discovering Render To Disk and realizing I could save stuff out and open it up in Rainbow Paint... which has been lost in the sands of internet.
> As a high school student I was fascinated and implemented it on any machine I had access to. I remember being bored in math class and coding it on my TI-81 calculator.
In a recent contract I had very little to do for a few weeks and access to a ~9000 core server cluster and a workload-distribution framework...
The story goes much the same way as the others I suspect, only this one could draw high res images very fast. I learned the maths behind a dozen or so fractal types and various colouring strategies, made some very pretty pictures.
Unfortunately as it was on client time and equipment I couldn't take it with me and it lives on only as a piece of sample code attached to the client's distributed processing framework!
But damn - drawing 38400 x 21600 resolution sets in record time was fun :)
I remember it too. I got the algorithm from some programming magazine, without understanding the maths behind it. I went to the local bookstore in my little town to find books on the topic, but they didn't have any. I envy the kids today who have access to so much resources.
luckily I had a subscription to Scientific American so when I read that article I immediately wrote it up in the language at hand - turbo pascal - which would take overnight to generate a full screen Mandelbrot image - that was about 1987 or so - excellent motivation for young brash explorers who loved the unknown - the algorithm was just easy enough to get working without too much frustration yet capable of generating infinitely beautifully complex views into reality
Thanks for posting the Sci Am article. I discovered Mandelbrot around 1994, and proceeded to program it in QB. Soon after, I found an old Sci Am article sitting around, and it was the one with the Mandelbrot! We almost never bought Sci Am articles, so it was a very pleasant surprise.
I keep reading that the Lorenz can be modeled on an analogue computer, and I want to find an example of how, so I can port it to a synthesizer and listen to it
Here is my collection of Lorenz equation implemented in 140 characters of Javascript: https://www.dwitter.net/h/lorenz
My favorite is the flying butterfly with flapping wings.
It's defined as 3 differential equations. So you use some multipliers and summers to calculate those 3 equations and feed those into 3 integrators. The integrator. Outputs are what you plot on a scope or listen to. Use pots for the variable gains in the equations.
As a high school student I was fascinated and implemented it on any machine I had access to. I remember being bored in math class and coding it on my TI-81 calculator. That took a while to render in black and white but it did work!
Great memories. Thanks for posting.