[HN Gopher] Show HN: Fractal Garden - An Exhibition of Mathemati...
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       Show HN: Fractal Garden - An Exhibition of Mathematical Beauty
        
       Author : trebeljahr
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2022-10-09 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.fractal.garden)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.fractal.garden)
        
       | umutcankus wrote:
       | Really beautiful, thanks for your effort! I am trying to prepare
       | a small presentation inspired by the book `The Computational
       | Beauty of the Nature`for an introductory engineering course and
       | some examples in this website can provide good visual material.
       | 
       | edit: also would appricate to able to zoom in.
        
         | trebeljahr wrote:
         | The Computational Beauty of Nature is such a cool book!
         | 
         | There is also ABOP - the Algorithmic Beauty of Plants
         | http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop which has been a huge
         | inspiration for this project.
        
       | trebeljahr wrote:
       | Hi HN,
       | 
       | in September I built this website, which explores some
       | mesmerizing fractals. The idea behind it is to have a beautiful
       | "garden" that instead of being filled with flowers and plants is
       | filled with magnificent mathematical objects. The fractals are
       | all interactive and you can play around with the options,
       | changing colors, iterations, and more.
       | 
       | The whole thing is open source, so if you feel like it and have
       | the time, please contribute to the project. It's tagged for the
       | Hacktoberfest and contributions count toward your Hacktoberfest
       | progress! Here's the link to the GitHub:
       | https://github.com/trebeljahr/fractal-garden
       | 
       | The fractal garden, as such is part of what I am trying to do
       | right now, picking awesome projects I always wanted to do and
       | that are just outside my comfort zone (in terms of skills or
       | knowledge). I then try to build as much of them as I can within a
       | month, before moving on to the next project the next month.
       | 
       | I write summaries of the learnings I had during the projects on
       | https://www.trebeljahr.com/
       | 
       | Let me know what you think and the ideas and feedback you have.
       | 
       | Enjoy your day and take care.
       | 
       | Cheers, Rico
        
         | aintmeit wrote:
         | Hey you! I've read the blog. It's magnificent. I looked at your
         | garden. It's incredible. Love love love. Live, laugh, love.
         | Cheers.
        
         | Zhyl wrote:
         | It doesn't seem like you can zoom very far (on Android, at
         | least), which to me undermines quite a lot of the wonder of
         | fractals.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | trebeljahr wrote:
           | This is sadly true and I whole-heartedly agree with you...
           | 
           | It's because I didn't find a way to construct only parts of
           | the fractals based on the viewport. Many of the fractals you
           | can see in the garden are generated iteration by iteration
           | and generating the next iteration for only the visible part
           | is not a trivial problem to solve... I struggled thinking
           | about a solution for this, but in the end gave up in favor of
           | having more fractals.
           | 
           | For the Mandelbrot Set the above is not the case, but the
           | zoom there is still very limited due to precision issues in
           | WebGl (a float has only limited bits, even for high precision
           | floats) and things get horribly slow if trying to implement
           | arbitrary precision on the GPU.
           | 
           | There are some ideas around "perturbation theory" that can
           | help to get more zoom on the Mandelbrot Set (still not
           | infinite) but I had a very hard time wrapping my head around
           | how to implement that in a shader.
           | 
           | But please, if you have ideas of how to fix this - the
           | project is open source and it would be 100% awesome if it
           | were possible to nicely zoom in/out of all of them.
           | 
           | I opened an issue on the repo:
           | https://github.com/trebeljahr/fractal-garden/issues/22
        
         | anigbrowl wrote:
         | It's very nice and I look forward to adding to to it.
         | 
         | I wonder if you(or someone else) knows of a general tool for
         | exploring L-systems? As you comment, 'all L-systems are
         | related', but I've had a hard time navigating the theoretical
         | literature on this. For several years now I've been looking for
         | a way to examine a tree or other network and extrapolate a
         | structural 'recipe' for it. I'll get this _Algorithmic Beauty
         | of Plants_ book but would love to hear of any resources you
         | know for  'reverse engineering' L-systems from existing tree
         | structures.
        
           | trebeljahr wrote:
           | I have no idea honestly...
           | 
           | One pointer that might be worth exploring, which is not quite
           | L-Systems but might be related is Fractal Compression. I've
           | read that there are algorithms to compress images into a
           | "closest" IFS - iterated function system.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression
           | 
           | Maybe one could come up with a way of going from an image via
           | fractal compression to an IFS which could then be used as the
           | basis for an L-system?
           | 
           | Most of the L-Systems that are on this site are from Paul
           | Bourke - http://paulbourke.net/fractals/lsys/
           | 
           | Which is a really awesome resource!
        
             | anigbrowl wrote:
             | Thanks, these are really great resources and I'm looking
             | forward to exploring them. It's striking to me that so much
             | work was done on this in the 1990s and early 2000s and that
             | the subfield seems to have (mostly) been overlooked since.
        
           | trebeljahr wrote:
           | also Wikipedia says that this is an open problem. However,
           | with the "citation needed" warning...
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system#Open_problems:~:text=.
           | ...
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-09 23:00 UTC)