4 ms·
I still remember the day I read the article on the Mandelbrot set and went, "Whoa, I understand the math!" I went on to write my first Mandelbrot renderer in P
by krylon 9y ago
I still remember the day I read the article on the Mandelbrot set and went, "Whoa, I understand the math!"
I went on to write my first Mandelbrot renderer in Python. I was delighted, in a way, that it worked, but badly disappointed at the performance.
I rewrote the thing in C, and then rewrote it again to make use of multiple CPU cores. I am certain there are Mandelbrot renderers out there that put mine to shame. But still, it was fun, and I got some pretty desktop wallpapers out of it. And I learned a thing or two along the way. Also, I rewrote it again using PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) to spread the work out across several computers. So I actually learned two or three things along the way. ;-)
In a previous job, I had a supervisor who learned programming in the mid-80s who told me about rendering the Mandelbrot set, then using bit-twiddling on the VGA memory to change the color palette on the display. I was not sure if I should be envious to have missed those times or happy.
- dekhn 9y agoyeah, once z = z2 + c was explained, most of Mandelbrot was easy for me too. I tried it in BASIC on an Apple IIe. it was the first time I was confronted with the question of whether it was safe to run the computer over night, or if it would overheat. The next morning, the computer was fine, but it still hadn't reached an interesting part of the set. So once I got a PC I ended up using Fractint. In those days, Intels had slow floating point, so they ported the algorithm to use integer. That was much more effective than jjust speeding up the machine clock (my first learning about performance). Palette cycling was "cool" but by the time I got to college, while I thought I'd spend all my time generating fractals, I found the real world more interesting...