Writings of Mass Deduction

I’m an old school nerd. I’ve been a nerd since way before it was cool. Back in the days before Comic-Con was a huge destination for movie stars and infiltrated mainstream culture, it was seriously un-cool to “geek out” when I was a kid. “Fractopia” were one of the popular bits of nerd culture from before it was cool to be a nerd.

With a fractal, a calculation is run recursively forever. No matter how far you zoom in, you keep finding new and cool patterns. The Mandelbrot set is the most famous, and it’s fully zoomed out shape can be found in “mini-Mandelbrots” repeatedly as you zoom in, among other cool areas. This supports the Julia fractal as well, probably the second most famous one. To think how long we waited for the fractal to be recalculated in the old days, and now it’s real time and in drastically higher resolution. It’s cooler than it sounds (unless it sounds really cool, that is), and costs a dollar.

Here’s what the publisher (Nostatic Software) has to say about the game:

“Fractopia uses the power of your Xbox graphics processor to enable fast, interactive exploration of the beauty of the Mandelbrot and Julia fractals. Math has never been so pretty!”