I find the images generated by iterated equations profoundly beatiful and interesting, and I've hunted them with hungry eyes since before my career with IBM. In fact, I probably owe my career to the esteemed Benoit Mandelbrot, as inner loops went from my hobby to my livelihood.
So, late in the last century, when I needed a test case to brutally abuse Java threads on a headless virtual machine, I wrote laika2
to go look for some of the aforementioned beatiful images.
At the time, IBM let me hand out the complete source code at a COMMON conference, and as such I feel free to pick it up and play with it some more in my retirement.
The first commit has the original Java source code, the original com.ibm
package, a minimalist manifest for java -jar
, and a simple .maker
script fragment.
To build and test, source the .maker from the command line and then run java -jar jars/yourown.jar -h
for simple help text (or use --help
for a much longer description with lots of multisyllabic words).