
Burning Ship Fractal - dedalus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Ship_fractal
======
carlbarrdahl
7 minute zoom of the fractal. Incredible level of detail and that final
mirrored inverted fractal at 6'38 took me by surprise.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD9yNFmb2FE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD9yNFmb2FE)

Are there any good fractal explorers in VR?

~~~
foobarian
That is insane. How is it possible to zoom in that far? Looks like it would
have to use some kind of big number library and then parallelize the heck out
of it.

I like how the rest of the page seemed to zoom out when I glanced outside the
video after watching a few minutes or so.

~~~
cauterized
I remember seeing seemingly endless fractal zoom animations like these as long
as 20 years ago. Basically, you're not calculating the entire original field
of view to anything near the final level of depth. At any given frame, you're
essentially doing the calculations only for what's in the current frame and
only to the level of detail to support the current pixel count.

~~~
andrewflnr
Well, yeah, but the mantissa alone on your numbers is going to get
ridiculously long. That's going to take a bite out of your CPU even just for
the ~1000x1000 pixels in the frame

~~~
simcop2387
> Well, yeah, but the mantissa alone on your numbers is going to get
> ridiculously long. That's going to take a bite out of your CPU even just for
> the ~1000x1000 pixels in the frame

Utterly devastate the computational ability of your CPU. I remember setting up
my and k6 300mhz to compute stuff sometimes for days to get awesome fractal
deep zooms like this. The computation is embarrassingly parallel but no
hardware handles numbers that precise with any reasonable speed. Something
like 1024 bit floating point in fractint back in the day. I'd love to see an
efficient GPU implementation of that kind of stuff

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iverjo
Fractals can be drawn by surprisingly small amounts of code. For example, this
mandelbrot fractal is implemented in 122 characters of JavaScript:
[https://www.dwitter.net/d/123](https://www.dwitter.net/d/123)

I wouldn't be surprised if the burning ship fractal could be coded on dwitter
(i.e. with 140 characters or less) as well

~~~
quarterto
Just need to add a Math.abs:
[https://www.dwitter.net/d/457](https://www.dwitter.net/d/457)

~~~
vog
Nice, but you don't need Math.abs to stay within the 140 chars limit:

    
    
      t?i++:i=0;for(j=1080;j--;){a=b=0;k=35;for(;k--&&a*a+b*b<4;)c=a*a-b*b+i/540-2,b=2*(a*b<0?-a*b:a*b)+j/540-1,a=c;x.fillRect(i,j,1,S(k/9))}

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rhubarbquid
I started working on a web based renderer for the burning ship fractal a
little while ago. It's far from perfect, I still consider it a WIP, but it
works well enough to play around with:
[http://stevenmcdonald.github.io/fractals/burning_ship/](http://stevenmcdonald.github.io/fractals/burning_ship/)

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jawarner
I'm always fascinated by how simple functions like this generate complex
behavior when iterated.

~~~
wyager
I agree. It's very strange that extremely simple, very fundamental functions
lead to such stochastic-looking nonsymnetric behavior. Where does all that
"entropy" come from? It's certainly not hidden in any big numbers in the
fractal definition.

~~~
jerf
"Where does all that 'entropy' come from?"

Your scare quote suggests you may already know this, but for the benefit of
others, the answer is that there isn't any. Fractals may look visually
complicated, but their information content is fully captured by the routines
used to generate them, which include the formula and the coloring system being
used.

This is one of the ways in which "information" is a highly counter-intuitive
quantity for people. Very small numbers of bits in a given encoding scheme can
produce incredibly complicated pictures, but there's still no more information
that what was put in to start with. Simply looking at something and going
"Yup, that's complicated" does not mean it has a lot of information in it.

~~~
wyager
Yes, that is what I mean. Why is there a disconnect between the complexity of
the compact description and the naive description? Why are simple expressions
not simple in all "natural" representations?

This is _not_ addressable with the contrived example of "you can create an
encoding scheme that reduces an arbitrarily complex description to an
arbitrarily short identifier". After all, this is not a constructed
compression scheme. Why does nature expand simple expressions to _these_
particular complicated forms?

~~~
schoen
> Why are simple expressions not simple in all "natural" representations?

Another example might be the primes, which have a very simple description and
very subtle structure in their distribution.

~~~
qubex
I don't really agree that the primes “have a very simple definition” in that
the notion of ‘primeness’ is one of satisfiability and no constructive
algorithm is known to exist.

~~~
jerf
I'm not sure what you mean by not having a constructive algorithm to produce
primes. The Sieve of Eratosthenes will output any given prime, with the primes
coming out in order, given enough time. There may not be an _efficient_
algorithm, but for most definitions of "information" that won't matter. The
sequence of all primes is both so richly structured we've probably only
scratched the surface _and_ almost entirely bereft of information.

~~~
qubex
Yup you're right and I'm wrong.

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based2
[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3379](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3379)

[http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=vie...](http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=4057)

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moridin
Anyone else thing that the Julia set diagram of this looks like a Nazca-line
Image? Imagine you reverse engineered the Nazca Images on the ground and they
described advanced Mathematics...Sci-Fi short story Idea there for sure :D

~~~
TeMPOraL
So a bunch of archaeologists are studying some markings found on the stones in
a recent dig, when a computer nerd pops in and says, "hey, this looks
familiar; I've played with those the other day". Everyone is stunned as she
pulls out her laptop and shows them that little fractal demo she wrote...

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anotheryou
Hehe, by the guy who sued CERN, because of the possibility of a black hole
emerging. (he didn't think it was likely, but not unlikely enough to him)

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vog
I love the reference to the 1k demo "JenterErForetrukket". Here is its link on
Pouet:

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54663](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54663)

Unfortunately, that demo is not that portable, and I was unable to find a
video of it.

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SudoNhim
Hah. I would guess that this made its way here because someone posted one on
ShaderToy recently. See:
[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtKGDD](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtKGDD)

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booleandilemma
Looks like a pareidolia fractal.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia)

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xorange
here's a Google-maps style fractal explorer that does the Burning Ship fractal
and others

[http://atleebrink.com/julia.html](http://atleebrink.com/julia.html)

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hahamrfunnyguy
....There's a fractal for that!

