Crazy idea, I know, but I'm going to do it anyway...

[simon.snake]

Curiosity got the better of me, and I have written the following FractInt formula:

Code:

simon0051-H {
  z = p = pixel
  t = c = 0:
  c = c + 1 ; increase count
  if (c==1)
    z = fn1(z*z)+p
  elseif (c==2)
    z = fn2(z*z)+p
  elseif (c==3)
    z = fn3(z*z)+p
  elseif (c==4)
    z = fn4(z*z)+p
    c = 0
  endif
  |z| < 4
}

What it does is: every four iterations are performed by four functions.  They could all be the same, or different, and the order of the functions probably will make a difference to the finished image.  Now, I would like to catalogue all the images that can be created in FractInt with this formula.

Here's the tricky bit - FractInt has 31 built in functions, so using 4 in any sequence gives a mind boggling 923521 permutations.  I've started (manually) today and so far have created around 1100 of them, so only another 922421 or there about to go through.

• Is this ambitious?  Yes.
• Will there be duplicate images?  Maybe, but to me it seems highly unlikely.
• Will it achieve anything?  Don't know.
• Will it take forever to achieve?  Probably.
• Why on earth would I do this?  I don't know.  I think I would like to create all these images and then using them as frames of an animation I think that in the right sequences they would be quite mesmerising.  Maybe I would like to create some sort of interactive chart of all the formulas and when you select a function it would bring up all the images that used that function so you could browse them interactively.
• Is there any way of automating the process?  Who knows, I'm not that clued up on FractInt and certainly wouldn't know how to write a FractInt 'batch file' to automate the process, as I don't even know how to assign the functions of a formula on startup, let alone know how to do it for every possible image.

I've worked out that if I worked solidly on this day in, day out, and achieved 1100 images a day, I'd be finished in 840 days (more than 2 years).

This 'simple project' is turning into a nightmare.  Some of the images are good and so far I have seen a wide array of image formats.

This one popped out not so long ago (I've rotated it 90 degrees to the left in Paint Shop Pro) and it seems ideal for Easter Day:


"The Lord has risen again"

(I'm not particularly religious, this image just got the creative juices flowing).

[simon.snake]

Well, after spending a day and a half on this and only achieving around 2,500 images, I decided that I would be better off automating the whole process to weed out the human error part of it, and to speed the whole thing up, so here I am sitting writing this reply to my original post on a laptop that is running a command line batch file which uses a number of 'look ups' to string together the command line parameters that are required by FractInt, and generates the images automatically.

So far I have only been running for about 20 minutes and it has generated 150 images so I will leave it running overnight and see what happens by morning time.  I wonder how many iterations in total the whole process will go through once it completes?

[Jameses]

any new interesting images?

[simon.snake]

Running the formula with the following four functions (in this order):

asin
tanh
sinh
cosh

Produces the following formula which looks quite good at deeper zooms:



I find the default palette not so good but when it is changed some very nice images appear:









Current count is just over 25,000 images created!

Simon

[simon.snake]

Latest stats on progress:

Moved batch file to server I have running all the time, as laptop was getting too hot.

So far running the batch file to generate all possible permutations, I have created:

149,901 GIF Files out of a total of 923,521
size: 3,777,357,189 bytes (4,082,135,040 bytes on disk)

Just as well I've got plenty of disk space available (over 200GB)

Some nice images created but will take some time to go through them to weed out the rubbish ones.

Thankfully, to stop the batch file placing too many files in one directory, I have added a move command so that every 29,000 ish gif files (31^3) they get moved into an 'archive\xx' folder where xx is the first two digits of the file names (they are named wwxxyyzz where each pair of digits is the index of the function used).

So at the end I will have 31 folders, each containing a little over 29,000 files, which will be quite a lot to explore to find nice images.

At this rate it will probably take a few weeks to finish.