Share your interesting mistakes

[fractower]

Hi All

Maybe you made an odd number of sign errors, maybe you mis-declared a float as an int... The real question is why are mistakes often more interesting than successes. Please share your interesting failures. Also try to explain your mistake so we can laugh at you.

To start off the process, I mis-copied the icosahedron coords from Google to produce this  faux pas.

[David Makin]

Here are a couple of images that came from a mistake with respect to periodicity colouring - for some obscure reason I used abs(|z|-|older value|) instead of |z-older value| and these are a couple of the results (just z^2+c Julias):

An Orchid:


Orchid 2:

[DarkBeam]

Probably all my formulas are mistakes (some neither interesting... )

[lkmitch]

Dave, did you make a mistake in posting your image?  A mistake on a mistake thread--does that mean you did it right?   

[knighty]

Inverse iteration julia that gone wrong! 
Here is the evaldraw wersion. The original version was in turbo pascal done a loooong time ago .

Code:

() 
{
enum {SIZE=512,PRECALC=100, PARTNUM=10};
static tab[SIZE][SIZE];
static extabr[10000],extabg[10000],extabb[10000];
static expo,HSIZE,QSIZE,i1,j1;

if (numframes==0){
   HSIZE=SIZE/2;
   QSIZE=SIZE/4;
   expo=1.0;expor=0.5;expog=0.5;expob=0.025;
   for (i=0; i<1000;i++){
      extabr[i]=256*(exp(-expor*i/256));
      extabg[i]=256*(exp(-expog*i/256));
      extabb[i]=256*(exp(-expob*i/256));
   }
   i1=0;j1=0;
}

al=alpha(); be=beta();

for(i=0;i<SIZE;i++)
   for(j=0;j<SIZE;j++) tab[i][j]=0;

//cls(255,255,255);
cls(255,255,255);

x=100; y=100; INFRM=-1/1000;
   for (i=0;i<PRECALC;i++)
   {
      a=x-al;
      b=y-be;
      x=sqrt(a*a+b*b);
      y=sqrt((x-a)*0.5);
      x=sqrt((x+a)*0.5);
      if (b<0) y=-y;
      a=rdm();b=rdm();
      x*=a; y*=b;//we should do y*=a instead :)
   }
   do
   {
      for (i=0;i<PARTNUM;i++)
      {
         a=x-al;
         b=y-be;
         x=sqrt(a*a+b*b);
         y=sqrt((x-a)*0.5);
         x=sqrt((x+a)*0.5);
         if (b<0) y=-y;
         a=rdm();b=rdm();
         x*=a; y*=b;//we should do y*=a instead :)
         
         //putpixel(x,y);
         i1=x*QSIZE+HSIZE;
         j1=y*QSIZE+HSIZE;
         tab[i1][j1]+=1;
         c=(1-exp(INFRM*tab[i1][j1]))*1000;
         setcol(extabr[c],extabg[c],extabb[c]);
         setpix(i1,j1);
      };
   }while((al==alpha())&&(be==beta()));
}

rdm()
{
   a=RND;
   if (a>0.5) return 1;
   return -1;
}

alpha()
{
   return 4*(mousx-0.5*xres)/xres;
}

beta()
{
   return 4*(mousy-0.5*yres)/xres;
}

putpixel(x,y)
{
   setpix(x*0.25*xres+0.5*xres,y*0.25*xres+0.5*yres);
}

[fractower]

David's broken links prove that two wrongs don't make a right, but they do add the humor value. Therefore I am awarding you the "Null Pointer" award. It's after midnight and somewhere in the 2000 lines of code you just wrote in a caffeine induced frenzy is a run away link list. Bless your heart (A colloquialism in the Southern US that translates to "Sucks to be you.")

Darkbeam, Darkbeam, Darkbeam. Bless your heart. Honesty is not the best policy.

Knight gets the "Nan" award. I was originally going to rename it the "Not a nerd" award, but I have been reading your posts. I suspect you could quote the IEEE definition of a nan then argue that the square root of negative one is a perfectly good number in the complex scalar field.

[kronikel]

I had plenty of these, I'll have to start saving them now.
A mistake in the diamond square algorithm recently carved the sierpenski triangle into my mountainside 

[Yesiamjames]

This is the result of my first attempt at programming a mandelbrot rendering program. I have no freaking idea what this is.

[fractower]

It looks vaguely familiar. I think it may be a Mandelwhat. For your effort you get the "+inf" award. It has escaped already. Give it a break.

[DarkBeam]

I had plenty of these, I'll have to start saving them now.
A mistake in the diamond square algorithm recently carved the sierpenski triangle into my mountainside 

Leave it! And add also some mandelboxes around (houses) and some mandelbulbs (bushes)

[fractower]

I had plenty of these, I'll have to start saving them now.
A mistake in the diamond square algorithm recently carved the sierpenski triangle into my mountainside

Are you sure it was an artifact. It might have been a petroglyph from an ancient tribe of mathematicians.

[cKleinhuis]

ok, here comes my bit, it happened some years ago, when playing around with hybrid/alternating combinations, and implementing the complex multiplication wrongly:

http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=10

[Sockratease]

I'm no programmer any more, but I got this playing with Mandelbulb 3D.  I started with one of my old files and wanted to see what reflections would do to it.

Started it rendering and saw it wanted 3 hours!  So I stopped it.  Then noticed it was high resolution at 1:3 view, so when I set it back to 1:1, and got the usual distortions that causes when interrupting a render, it looked like this:



Wow.

[kronikel]

Are you sure it was an artifact. It might have been a petroglyph from an ancient tribe of mathematicians.

It's all becoming so clear now... ancient mathematicians must have embedded the sierpenski triangle into my mind causing me to subliminally write it into my algorithm!
o.O

@cKleinhuis - That looks like some crazy evil face wearing an upside down cowboy hat

[lycium]