Yeah, I know: computer art. But still, I like how these came out.
This is a plot of an iterated function system. I’ve coded these up plenty of times before, but always using affine transforms as in Barnsley’s Fractals Everywhere. After seeing the Sheepsaver screen saver I realized there’s no reason not to use other kinds of functions, and throwing in second-order products is an obvious next step.
A surprising thing happened, though: With affine transforms, most of the randomly-generated IFSes aren’t very interesting—one of the functions usually has a scaling factor close to zero, and the whole thing sort of collapses into a spiky jumble. With the higher-order functions, nearly every set of randomly-chosen parameters produces an interesting image. (Or as interesting as the one above, anyway.)
So what do I do with this? I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble of fixing up the app for general consumption—in that context it seems like it’s not much more than a novelty. But I’ll keep playing with this, maybe put prints up on Etsy. I’ll let you know.
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