Development [LWN.net]

Visualize Chaos with Fyre

The open-source software world often produces interesting applications for the exploration of the artistic side of science and math. One such application is Fyre, written by David Trowbridge and Micah Dowty. [Fyre]

The project description states:

Fyre is a tool for producing computational artwork based on histograms of iterated chaotic functions. At the moment, it implements the Peter de Jong map in a fixed-function pipeline with an interactive GTK+ frontend and a command line interface for easy and efficient rendering of high-resolution, high quality images. This program was previously known as 'de Jong Explorer', but has been renamed to make way for supporting other chaotic functions.

Some of the capabilities of Fyre include:

Near-instant rendering of specified chaotic functions.
Continuous improvement of the image quality in real-time.
The ability to modify many parameters in the chaotic function.
Support for randomly generated function parameters.
The ability to specify image resolutions and colors.
A variety of built in image manipulation tools.
Toolbars for entering parameters, Animation, Status and interactivity.
Automatic recording of the history recently constructed images.
The ability to store and read back previously generated images.
Image output to PNG files.
The ability to construct movies.

The screenshots page shows the Fyre interface, and the gallery page shows some selected output from the application.

Version 1.0.1 of Fyre, code named Lemon curry? has been released: "Wow, it's been a while! This release sports several improvements: a beautiful new icon, some performance increases, a more robust oversampling method, and other bug fixes." The Fyre news page explains the project history, and discusses plans for upcoming releases.

Building Fyre 1.0.1 was fairly straightforward on a Ubuntu 5.10 system, it involved downloading the source code, unpacking, running configure, fixing a missing library dependency, and running make/make install.

Running Fyre was easy, the user interface takes little time to figure out, and a variety of interesting images were produced quickly. As with any number-crunching application, a fast CPU is recommended.

With Fyre's ability to generate an infinitely variable stream of pretty pictures, Fyre could be used for generating web graphics, printed graphics, and more. The application is also useful for those wanting to explore an interesting mathematical domain.

To be a true eye-candy application, it would be nice if Fyre could run in an automatic random mode, and the images could be improved if the simple two color display mode were expanded. Nonetheless, Fyre produces some impressive and beautiful images.

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