Last week I was pretty sick amd I ended up awake at 4 AM. That's a pretty dull
hour to do anything interesting and for some reason my half functioning brain
wondered what happened to
Fractint,
that old program I used to use at the university back in the 90's to compute
Mandelbrot fractals.
Turns out Fractint development kind of stopped at
Fracting version 20.0,
one that is said to "even work under Win95". Outch :-)
However the DOS version still rocks. It runs very nicely under XP in DOS mode
without any tweaks and finds lots of interesting VESA modes to use, so I ended
up using 1280x1024 mostly.
In a matter of minutes I got myself re-acquainted with the interface and
generated these images:
  
Click on the images to view the full album and larger versions.
Fractint is unique in that it
can compute in a variety of precisions, ranging from integer to floating point but
also the one called "arbitrary precision". Think zooms in the range of 10^100 or,
as you will see below, 10^240. 20 years ago the speed was simply ridiculous.
This is called "deepzooming", and you can view many deep zoom examples here.
Deepzooming at the top of the Mandelbrot set has already been done, for example
in this page from Bengt MÃ¥nsson.
To put things in perspective, the most inner zoom I computed took me 3h30 at 1280x1024
whereas the page above reports 800 hours at 640x480 on a 90 MHz Pentium.
All of this starts when zooming at the tip of Mandelbrot, near -2,0.
There are a bunch of converging "nodes".
One would think the intersection of two nodes is empty.
Nothing exciting to see here?
Yet by zooming at the intersection between 2 nodes, it eventually splits in 4, then 8, 16, etc...
And there's yet-another Mandelbrot in there:
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