Iconizer: Colour mappings |
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Iconizer draws a strange attractor by the mathematical process of iteration. This involves going many times around a loop of instructions. The more times around the loop the better the quality of the resulting image. This is a remarkable property of iteration that could not be properly appreciated before computers were invented. Sometimes million of iterations are needed before the symmetry on average starts to emerge. Of course, it takes longer and longer to go around the loop more and more times. It is to maximize the efficiency of the search for interesting images that Iconizer has a Quick Try followed by more time consuming options.
On the previous page generating a Quick Try image was discussed. The Quick Try button performs one hundred thousand iterations in around two seconds. For more iterations go to the Grey map window. This gives three options that allow the generation of a better quality "black and white" image, more correctly known as a "grey scale" image. As you can see from the picture below, the time to generate the image is directly proportional to the number of iterations applied.
On my Iyonix it takes 16 minutes to produce a 50 million iterations image. That's around 52 thousand iterations a second. This took some very careful programming to achieve. On a StrongARM Risc PC this time will need to be doubled. I'd be interested to hear from anyone achieving faster times. This might be with Virtual Acorn on a Microsoft or Apple machine, or on new native RISC OS hardware such as the Beagleboard.
Iconizer can produce colour images. Six colour schemes are supplied, these being accessed from the Colour map main menu item. Clever programming allows some very pretty images to be obtained from just 25 million iterations in around 13 minutes. The software has been carefully set up to produce optimal images in as short a time as possible.
Note that increasing the symmetry increases the time taken. The Grey map window and Colour map window will adjust the given estimate of the time likely to be required to generate the proposed image to reflect this.
On the next page altering the contrast of an image will be considered.
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