Rediscovering Fracal Visualization
As I was cleaning up old files on my server I came across several old college projects. One of them contained several Java applets for fractal visualization — circa 2002. While I cringed slightly at the writing I was impressed with the mathematics that I have since forgotten! Like, what the hell is IFS and why am I calling it non-deterministic? Apparently, it’s a random iteration algorithm where I assign probabilities to each function in an IFS (Iterative Function System). An IFS is a set of affine transformations, and in this case each transformation is assigned a probability– Obviously!
There’s also some classic Mandelbrot and Julia Sets. Since several years have passed since this was all created, I’m interested in doing similar visualizations and not using Java. Java never really did catch on for client-side web applications. Although I do like the idea of doing the number crunching on the client side :) Maybe I’ll try it in Flash…
If interested, here is what is left of the old fractal page:
