Click here to see the first animation made with the lastest mandelbrot ship. The Parthenon
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Click here to view Mandelbrot ship animations
Click here to view pictures from journeys with the Mandelbrot Ship.
Welcome to the online journal of what was the first historic journey of the ship designed to travel the Mandelbrot fractal formula. It all began when the PBS channel broadcast a television program called, "Colors of Infinity" narrated by Arthur C. Clark. This introduced the mathematical phenomenon achieved with complex numbers and fractal geometry. The result of a certain formula is "the Mandelbrot fractal", named after a famous mathematician of the same name. This amazing image is created by iterating complex numbers that correspond to grid coordinates through an equation. After testing the coordinates 100+ times, the program determines with each iteration if the answer exists within or without the Mandelbrot set. If the point is stable and remains less then the value of 2 it exists in the Mandelbrot set, and thus is colored black as an arbitrary rule. Otherwise, if the answer extends to infinity we color it another arbitrary color determined by how many iterations it took before basically becoming infinite. Our ship iterates 100 times a point and has a simple color scheme thrown together for the sake of just getting the ship off the ground. The nature of this fractal math formula provides us the ability to zoom into the fractal.
The Mandelbrot ships were programmed with OpenGL Inventor, which is a C based graphics language. The first ships, called Orbiters, were only using black points that just drew the mandelbrot set itself.
This was quickly developed into the Magellan color strategy, which basically throws an arbitrary color on the number depending on what prime number between 1 and 17 of iterations the answer is divisible by. Future versions of this Mandelbrot traveling ship will use more sophisticated color strategies since this was basically to get the ship off the ground. Once the first Magellan versions were developed, the goal was set to have a ship that can go over 1000 times towards a point dubbed "Mandelbrot Island", which is the largest Mandelbrot on the equatorial nose to the left of the main Mandelbrot set.
Mandelbrot IslandThus began the historic first journey of the Mandelbrot technology towards Mandelbrot Island.
Mandelbrot Island at 105 times
Mandelbrot Island at 165 timesUnlike the many entertaining Mandelbrot applet programs you can find out there with the help of google, we at Fantazine were trying to program a ship with not just a zoom drive, but also a maneuver drive allowing one to travel left, right, up, and down at different depths of zoom. This is still a work in progress, but the technology has come a long way since these pictures were taken from the first Magellan. This ship needed most of the math figured out on paper, and entered correctly through the Warp drive. One mistake could loose the view port of the ship in what is known as warp space.
Lost in Warp SpaceWe were able to take the Magellan up to 1089 times toward Mandelbrot Island. At the time our ship, The Magellan was more like a sailboat compaired to the newer free version offered here on this site. The technology continues to develop and bug problems are still being solved, but these ships are now more like flying the Mandelbrot instead of slow sailing.
Mandelbrot Island shoreline at 1187 times Once we were successful in reaching Mandelbrot Island we began to use the Manuver drives to sail to the left of the island and explore the phenominon of this fractal, which constantly creates other smaller Mandelbrot sets that go on for infinity like an infinate number.
Sailing left of Mandelbrot Island
Interesting waters along the central equator of the Mandelbrot set.
Mandelbrot Islands are past along the left of Island journey.
Another small island past at thousand times.
So much to see at just around a thousand times. After traveling to the left of the island. The ship was brought back to the Butt end of Mandelbrot Island and the long journey to the right at 1189 times from Island to the Main shore of the main Mandelbrot set was taken on.
Beginning of Journey from Butt of Mandelbrot Island to the main shore. We've named this ship after the great explorer Magellan because this program has opened the door to an entire new world for us to explore.
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