Last night while I was supposed to be doing calculus, I got distracted by watching some of Vi Hart's videos. In particular, I was fascinated by her series on fractals.







Using the power of recursion, I made a small python script to draw the dragon curve, Koch curve, and Sierpinski triangle to an arbitrary depth. It uses the turtle library to make displaying stuff easy.

Here's a link to the gist: https://gist.github.com/Ivoah/7fc4173940eca415e352

That looks great! I'll have to watch those videos in more detail when I have time, as it looks like they make what can be a complex concept more approachable. Do you have any screenshots of your output you can share? What's the runtime like? For your Python, I strongly recommend more descriptive variable names. I assume one of those variables is a maximum depth, for example, but it's tough to tell which one (l?).

It took ~1 minute and 32 seconds to make the picture above. I could speed it up by not using a recursive algorithm, but I won't, because I made this specifically to do recursion.


Haha yeah, I really ought to. Keep in mind that this was written at 12 at night, so descriptive names weren't high on my list of priorities. I'll probably go back and fix it up a bit at some point.

Fun next step: port your code to PostScript, dig up an old PostScript printer, and send your program over. Stopwatch how long it takes to print one page at various recursion depths.

Oh, that is genius. I would definitely love to see that in action.