A browser fractal explorer seeded with thousands of wallpapers found by searching fractal space for hundreds of hours. Zoom, recolor, and download any view at any resolution.

[u/techmatt]

https://techmatt.github.io/fractals/explorer/

[u/Lauris024]

My first thought was "damn, it's rendering. That must be costly for the OP" and then I hear my fans start spinning.

[u/techmatt → u/Lauris024]

Under the hood, the core engine is all coded in Rust, but then (shockingly easily/effectively) put on the web via WebAssembly -- I barely had to change any of the underlying engine at all, and it was even slightly *faster* on the browser (on my Chrome tests at least) because the browser has really good multithreading support I guess. It's all CPU, I'm not using WebGL / web-based GPU stuff.

[u/MountainDoit → u/techmatt]

I’m both impressed by how fast top end phones have gotten and by your backend(work) lol. Very efficient, only takes a few seconds to render though ofc it’s much faster on my PC. Rust is a beautiful language

[u/DutchiiCanuck]

Gonna have to check this out on my large monitor tonight!

[u/techmatt → u/DutchiiCanuck]

It's hopefully pretty straightforward to re-render at whatever resolution you want, ex. here's a wide-screen wallpaper I made.

[u/SultanOfSodomy]

thank you, this is what I call a good corner of the Internet

[u/techmatt]

I built this project because it was hard to find certain color or styles of fractals in reasonable quantities. I trained small neural networks on my own ratings of fractal images, then let a search run for hundreds of hours to find a few thousand good wallpapers across the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and related fractals. The explorer lets you browse them, wander around nearby, change palettes and render styles, and zoom much deeper in the Deep tab.

Every view is a link, so you can share exactly what you're looking at, and download it at any screen resolution. No sign-up, everything runs in your browser.

How it was made: https://techmatt.github.io/fractals/ Deep zoom videos: https://techmatt.github.io/fractals/deep-zoom/videos.html

[u/rhcp1fleafan → u/techmatt]

So cool!! Awesome work and thanks for sharing! I've been really interested in learning since I saw Arthur C Clarke "Fractals: The Colours of Infinity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyeR19m8gGk&list=WL&index=57&t=831s

Also, I appreciate the explanations you provided here: https://techmatt.github.io/fractals/start-here.html

[u/Front-Card9910]

How did the search decide what counted as a “good” wallpaper? That filter is the real product here, the renderer is the easy part.

[u/techmatt → u/Front-Card9910]

Yes the renderer is pretty similar to what most art programs create for fractals; the "good" wallpapers are decided by two stages of convolutional networks (CNNs) that are trained on/my friend's manual labels -- one CNN determines whether a geometric location is "geometrically interesting/beautiful", independent of coloring/rendering. I run a really long search problem to find high-scoring geometry in each fractal family. Then, a second CNN determines whether a given rendered image is a beautiful wallpaper or not, factoring in rendering mode, color palette, framing, and everything else. This is also trained on my/my friend's manually labeled preferences. I then go over all the "beautiful locations", try many hundreds of random rendering mode / palette options for each one, and pick the best ones according to the estimate provided by the wallpaper-quality CNN.

[u/techmatt → u/[deleted]]

Claude did most of the UI work for the website, which certainly has its specific style/flair. I'm mostly a C++ coder and a terrible web developer, so my work was mostly on the backend and the perturbation work etc. for rendering the deep fractals quickly. Claude was actually pretty bad at the "search" problem for finding the wallpapers and determining what were good/bad rendering modes, it's hard to quantify what constitutes the boundary between "pretty" and "too noisy/chaotic".

[u/snotfart → u/[deleted]]

Yes. A rare example of AI that's not slop, although the feel of the page is a bit too AI-ey to feel comfortable to me.

[u/System0verlord → u/snotfart]

OP admitted to being a back end dev. Perhaps someone else could write a nicer front end for them?

[u/trackowner]

this is exactly the kind of weird little corner of the web i love. there's a public sky with exactly 1000 cloud billboards, and you can pop balloons to claim some of the free ones.

[u/WhoKilledZekeIddon → u/trackowner]

Your balloon thing was exactly the kind of pointless crap that people are sick of.