On 21/05/2011 10:09 PM, Warp wrote:
> On 05/19/2011 03:49 PM, gregjohn wrote:
>> In other words, we now have an artistic way to compare floating point
>> error
>> between different machines.
>
> The IEEE double-precision floating point format has 52 mantissa bits,
> and what you are seeing is hitting that limit. In other words, zooming
> any further would require more mantissa precision than that, and what
> you are seeing are the rounding errors caused by the mantissa not having
> enough bits.
>
> The IEEE double-precision format is pretty common in most computer
> architectures, so they will all hit the limit at the same zooming level.
>
> If the mandelbrot set were calculated using extended precision floating
> point numbers, which in the x87 have 64 mantissa bits, you could zoom a
> bit more (but not a lot) before hitting the artifacts.

How does Fractint's deep zooming work, then?

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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