I just got a fancy new 2021 MacBook Pro, the one with the Apple M1 chip. And it is fast. Really, really fast.<\/p>\n
I was curious to see just how fast it is, so I did what any self-respecting computer nerd would do. I implemented a visualization of the Mandelbrot set.<\/p>\n
I have a special connection to the Mandelbrot set. When Benoit Mandelbrot was preparing to re-issue his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature<\/i>, he visited MAGI to check out our Celco film recorder. He knew about us because we had used one of those to capture our CGI for TRON.<\/p>\n
Amazingly, the people I worked with sent me — the most junior mathematician at MAGI — to go out to lunch with him. Needless to say, it was thrilling to have a conversation with the great man. I had recently implemented the Noise function, and was using it to generate fractals, so we had a lot to talk about.<\/p>\n
The core operation in my current implementation does 100 iterations of Z=Z2<\/sup>+C at each pixel, with a user interface that lets you zoom in 1000-fold by clicking (you click again to zoom back out).<\/p>\n My new computer easily handles that. In fact, this computer is so fast that when I tried 1000 iterations per pixel, it still ran at full frame rates.<\/p>\n Which is amazing because the first time I ever tried implementing the Mandelbrot set, it took about an hour a frame. The mind boggles.<\/p>\n There are so many astonishing places in the Mandelbrot set, and it would be a shame to find one but then lose it forever. So at the top of the screen I display where you are. If you go back later to that location, the same beautiful details will be waiting for you.<\/p>\n I couldn’t decide what color scheme to use. Part of me wanted to go with a “fire” motif, and the other with an “ice” theme. So I decided to split the difference.<\/p>\n You can see what I mean if you run it, which you can do here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just got a fancy new 2021 MacBook Pro, the one with the Apple M1 chip. And it is fast. Really, really fast. I was curious to see just how fast it is, so I did what any self-respecting computer nerd would do. I implemented a visualization of the Mandelbrot set. I have a special … Continue reading “Widget Wednesdays #15”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24265"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24265"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24267,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24265\/revisions\/24267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}