> But 
> otherwise than stated in the manual, the calculation ends not at a 10^33 
> magnification, but merely at about 10^14, the pattern starts to look 
> "blocky".

  A double-precision floating point value has a 53-bits wide mantissa, which
is able to represent approximately 15 significant digits of accuracy. Thus
the limit you are seeing.

> Is it possible to increase this calculation depth without hacking 
> POV-Ray's source code?

  No. The accuracy of a double-precision floating point number is fixed in
hardware.

> If not, would it be legal according to the POV license to do so?

  You can do whatever modifications you want to it. It's publication which
has its limits.

  Note, however, that you won't be able to increase the accuracy unless you
use a multiple-precision floating point library which calculates the values
in software and will inevitably be extremely slow.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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