Surprise ending!

i thought the same but i can see that they were trying to avoid showing the repeating bulb formation until the end

Actually, now that I think of it, you can do some really cool things with Context Free. Anyone who is interested in computer art should check out that software. But I meant more like Mandlebrot & Julia fractals.

*Mandelbrot

My understanding is that this one was done all with custom code, probably using an arbitrary-precision C library, since there's no way even the most precise built-in floating point types would have been capable of zooming in to that degree.

In any case, there's a writeup about this particular video at http://forgetomori.com/2010/science/zooming-into-a-fractal-bigger- than-the-universe/ although it's sadly lacking in details.

C is probably right but more like C++ since you would need a few abstract classes (or I would prefer them) to handle floating point numbers to large exponents.

To handle that, I would probably use an abstraction class to handle very small numbers such that they are translated into exponents and then use a multiplier over the field.

Technically, I've done a similar generator for fractals in PHP of all things and would have written a perl layer for the graphics generator if I had more time. Alas, I had to settle for GD2 and patience since I didn't have much free time to fiddle around with it.

Perl could handle this without a problem.

Maybe it would be kind of fun to have a sort of fractal zoom site where you could zoom in on a fractal forever somehow and see where all your buddies are in the fractal.

But I doubt that would get more traffic than a man getting hit in the groin by a football on youtube.

Ha. I was only joking about QB because I tried to do one in that when I was very young and got these weird egg-shaped things. I'm sure you could do it in whatever language though....and I know that FRACTINT used fixed point math for everything. I'm in CS classes right now so maybe I'll do one with with the Java graphics library at some point for a project.