3D Mandelbrot Sets

FRUITY FRACTAL FRIPPERY


by The Fractal Farm





Plunging straight in at the deep end, here are a couple of dubiously


technical and. extremely complicated progs from our chums down on The


Fractal Farm. And who are they? Well, there's Thomas George Amsler


Rushton (snigger) and Jonathan Scott, who both should really have been


concentrating on their uni exams rather than playing with their


Spectrums. Be grateful they didn't though. Their fractal research has


now progressed into the third dimension, giving us a 3D Mandelbrot


generator which you'll absolutely lurve.





It's Basic all the way, so there's no need to fiddle about with


hexloaders. Just hammer it in and ... eek! It wants you to type in


four numbers! Fear not though. These are the usual Mandelbrot


coordinates, so you could try -2, -2, 4, 50 or indeed -1.5, -.5, .5,


100. Or just about anything, in fact. The results will be impressive,


but they'll take absolutely ages to appear, so be patient.





Next on offer is a Henon Strange Attractor plotter. You'll probably be


wanting to know what a Henon Strange Attractor is, eh? Ah.





Well it says here that it forms an infinitely long line that never


crosses itself using the equations:


xnew = y + 1 -1.4 x X x X


ynew = 0.3 x X


which sounds fairly handy to me. You'll also be delighted to hear that


the program features a zoom mode, so pressing 1 while the program is


running will make a little box appear that can be moved around with


the cursor keys (using Shift for added speed), and pressing 0 will


plot the area zoomed in on. Space will start plotting from scratch.





Once again, the speed of the thing falls some way short of "lightning",


so you'll have to either compile it or be extraordinarily patient.