I once read a book called 'Symmetry in Chaos’ by Mike Field and Martin Golubitsky. The book was filled with these beautiful figures produced by progressively iterating complex number points through functions. The functions would cause the points to attract to certain parts of the picture like sprinkling iron filings on a magnetised plate. Pixels would be coloured according to the density of their ‘dusting’. After reading about this I really had to give it a try, and within about a week I was producing these beautiful icons. The whole idea of the project was very rewarding. Type some numbers in, and get a stunningly beautiful picture out. Slowly the project became more and more serious and elaborate as I added support for more functions such as Barnsley IFS, and later more conventional wiping-type fractals like Mandelbrots, Burning-Ship, Buffalo, Barnsley as you find in UltraFractal, as well as some sets which I just “cooked up” by combining various functions. Eventually the engine got rather bloated it’s list of possible tasks was a little too numerous, at which point I started working on a plugin architecture. This allowed the program to become very much more flexible because literally anyone could design a new module.

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