Today, while I was working on my article about the chaos game, I discovered a critical flaw in Chaotica. When I was developing Chaotica, I noticed that when the fraction was less than 0.5 the image did not fill the window, and when it was bigger than 0.5 the image was also bigger than the window. To solve the problem what I did was to zoom the fractal in/out according to the fraction. Today, while I was looking at some IFSs(Iterated Function Systems) that represent instances of the chaos game, I suddenly realized that I had made a somewhat stupid mistake in the code that calculated the position of every new point. Instead of calculating the right position it was mapping all of the positions to a resized copy of the image placed in the upper left corner. I know that’s not very clear, but it’s not easy to explain where the mistake was; the important thing is that it is now fixed. To be quite honest I feel kinda stupid that this mistake went unnoticed, but I find it somewhat funny that instead of assuming there was a mistake in my code I just thought that was the normal behavior and implemented a workaround.

Because of the workaround, there is almost no difference between the images generated by Chaotica 1.0 and Chaotica 1.1. The only noticeable difference in the images is that now you should always be able to see where the original points of the polygon are located (in Chaotica 1.0 when the image was zoomed to fit, the points would end up outside of the visible part of the image so you were not able to see them). Other than that, the only change is that I have removed the “Keep real size” option from the preferences since all it did was enable/disable the “workaround”, and should have never been there in the first place. I have updated the article were Chaotica was posted accordingly, you can download Chaotica 1.1 here.