Hello guys!
I'm working on a short introduction to fractals for youtube. The rough cut and (german) text is done, but it will be in english.
I've translated it already, but there's probably quite a few words/lines that a native english speaker wouldn't use, or stuff that has potential to sound better stylistically.
The target group is people who know nothing of fractals, or just very basic stuff - with a slight focus on gamers.
(I'm aware of some minor discrepancies with what really happens, e.g. the generation of the mandelbrot set, but I only have 6-7 minutes and have to keep it really simple.)
If anyone of you native speakers could help me with this, I'd be very very gracious!
Please just copy the text and change whatever you have a better wording for, marking it
fat.
If you only have a single sentence, please make sure to copy the one before and after it as well, so I see where you've taken it from.
Here's the text:
Could mere mathematicians create an entire universe?
What does broccoli have to do with the Big Bang? And what does it have to do with video games like No Man's Sky and Minecraft?
One thing: all three are made using simple formulas that create infinite complexity.
In 1980 the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot publicized a simple formula:
z->z²+c
But you don't only use it once, you take the solution/result and feed it back into the formula as the next starting value.
Do this often enough and a pattern emerges: The Mandelbrot-Set.
The more often you repeat this calculation, the more complex details are revealed.
Ultimately you could repeat this infinitely – the only limitation is the processing power of your computer.
The patterns one can find here look strangely familiar and widespread. Mandelbrot gave them the name "fractals".
Fractal patterns seem so familiar because these shapes are omnipresent in nature.
The most important characteristic of fractals is the/their so-called self-similarity. Look at a fern leaf – it is made out of smaller and smaller copies of itself. The same is true for romanesco brocoli.
The branching pattern of trees follows this principle as well as the course of rivers. Lightning spreads into smaller and smaller branches, each sharing the same features as the main bolt.
But also human structures organize themselves into fractal patterns – without us actually planning them this way. Here is a map of all the roads leading to Rome.
And a map of the internet.
All this complexity is based on simple feedback processes and formulas like the Mandelbrot-Set.
With todays computers we have enough processing power to calculate animated 3dimensional worlds.
As it turns out, the simplest way to simulate a world as realistic as possible is to use fractal formulas.
The first completely (?) computer generated movie scene in a feature film was the fractal animation of a planet in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan
The team from Lucasfilm responsible for this was later aquired by Steve Jobs who created Pixar out of it – thus revolutioning Hollywood.
The animated movies look so realistic because the generated landscapes are based on the fractal principle of self-similarity.
Progress has continued and today these elaborate and costly rendered movie scenes have evolved into realtime"walkable gameworlds" ((as in computer games that you can walk through and explore))
The origin hasn't changed: Mathematical formulas that just need to be plugged with variables.
The gameworlds of Minecraft are created in this way.
Game developers call these variables "seeds".
The player enters a freely chosen string of characters as seed, which then is plugged into the world generation formulas to create all the terrain and features
If you enter the same seed, you will always get the exact same world as a mathematical result.
The most impressive simulation of an entire universe has now been achieved by a small team of 15 indie developers: The game "No Man's Sky" is probably the most complex and the largest gameworld ever created – and it fits on a single DVD.
Every player starts exploration on a randomly chosen planet in the games universe. His(?) starting coordinates are used as the seed-variable that – plugged into the games formulas – creates the whole visible world in realtime.
It would be impossible to store all details using traditional methods, you would need entire datacenters to store the data of the roughly 18 trillion planet sized planets, together with it's unique ecosystems
--------my most problematic sentence:
-alternative word for "store" to avoid repetition
-18 trillion (BE) or 18 quintillion (AE) -which one should I use for a worldwide audience? The number is visible in the video
-planet sized planets – is this ok, or is there a better way to say this
-"ecosystems" good? or would you say "flora and fauna" as in german?
---------
If you can create an entire universe using just a few fractal formulas, this raises the fair question if fractals are a much more fundamental element of our reality and cosmos ((than we currently acknowledge))
Thanks a lot in advance!