Implementing an ASCII Mandelbrot renderer
In 1975, the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot coined the term fractal. A fractal is a mathematical figure or set, which has certain interesting mathematical properties, but in the end, it just looks like a piece of art. Fractals also look infinitelyrepetitive when being zoomed in. One of the most popular fractals is the Mandelbrot set, which can be seen on the following poster:
A picture of the Mandelbrot set can be generated by iterating a specific formula:
The variables z and c are complex numbers. The Mandelbrot set consists of all such values of c for which the formula converges if it is applied often enough. This is the colored part of the poster. Some values converge earlier, some converge later, so they can be visualized with different colors. Some do not converge at all--these are painted black.
The STL comes with the useful std::complex class, and we will try to implement the formula without explicit loops, just for the sake of getting to know...
