Computing: Free Pascal Programming

Burning Ship fractal.


Download bship console program (Windows 64bit) Download bship source code (Lazarus/Free Pascal)

Description: Very simple program to draw the Burning Ship fractal. Scaling and zooming are set by entering the values using the keyboard and are rather elementary. Please have a look at the "bship readme" file, included in the .zip archive, for details.
The Burning Ship fractal is generated by iterating the function z(n+1) = (|Re(z(n))| + i|Im(z(n))|)^2 + c, z0 = 0 in the complex plane, the set of points either escaping or remaining bounded. This function is similar to the one used to calculate the Mandelbrot set; the difference is that the real and imaginary components are set to their respective absolute values before squaring at each iteration. Using different colors for different number of iterations produces colorful pictures, looking like ships. The most interesting region to look at, is a zoom at the lower left region of the fractal.
As for the juliaset program, bship asks for the scaling values of x and y and the zoom factor; the supplementary option not to "display iterations <= 16" (i.e. using the background color in these cases) allows to eliminate the colored rings around the set and thus emphasizes the shape of the ship.

Improvement: Implement scrolling using cursor keys instead of keyboard entry of scaling values.

Free Pascal features: Console drawing of mathematical functions using the graph unit.

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