It’s Sunday night and I’m a little bored, so I was poking around some fractal software and found a package called Xaos which is pretty cool. It’s got a nice mechanism to do real-time zooming into areas of the Mandelbrot Set (amongst others).
I remember messing around with Fractint back in college– perhaps 15 years ago– and how maddeningly slow it was to calculate these images. You’d find an area that looked interesting and wait for the computer to churn through the numbers for up to a minute before you saw the detailed image. Now my laptop can generate zoom levels in the billions in fractions of a second.
For math geeks like me, that’s pretty dang cool.