Deepest Mandelbrot Set Zoom Animation ever - a New Record! 10^275 (2.1E275 or 2^915)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as a reference point for how deep Mandelbrot zooms can go and how much compute they once took.
What it is
A Mandelbrot set zoom animation reaching a magnification of about 2.1x10^275, claimed as the deepest at the time (January 2010). Each frame was rendered separately over six months on 12 CPU cores.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2016 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends Retric · 2018-05 · on “High-Resolution Mandelbrot in Obfuscated Python (2011)”
Probably, I wonder what code they use for this: [LINK] because deeper zoom requires much higher precision math which takes a lot more computation. PS: Not as far but much better video: [this video]
Cites laser · 2016-07 · on “Show HN: FractalViewer: A JavaScript fractal explorer”
No, I mean that at a certain level of zoom the fractal appears to stop being generated, and I end up just zooming into pixel blocks. For example, if you try to recreate [this video] you can only for for a bit before the fractal appears to stop generating.
Cites Retric · 2017-06 · on “One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xerox Alto”
It crazy how far computers have improved so this is the kind of thing you can do as a hobby project. [this video]
Cites morphle · 2025-01 · on “Mandelbrot deep zoom theory and practice (2021)”
In 1986 we wrote a parallel Mandelbrot program in assembly instructions in the 2K or 4K on-chip SRAM of 17 x T414 Transputer chips linked together with 4 x 10 Mbps links each into a cheap supercomputer [1]. It drew the 512 x 342 pictures on a Mac 128K as terminal at around 10 seconds per picture. I later wrote the quadruple-precision floating-point calculations in microcode [2] to speed it up by a factor of 10 and combined 52 x T414 with 20 x T800 Transputers with floating point hardware into a larger supercomputer costing around $50K. With this cheap 72 core supercomputer it still would have taken years to produce the deep zoom of the Mandelbrot set [4] that took them 6 months with 12 CPU c