FXP-o2x

Ada, the starting point. Ada is a programming language designed at the end of the 1970s for the US Department of Defense, standardized in 1983 and named after Ada Lovelace, the first programmer. Strict, strongly typed and built for software that must never fail, it still flies in aircraft, trains and spacecraft, but it was never meant for drawing pictures. Rarely taught today, it was, in its Ada 95 revision, the imposed language during my computer science bachelor’s degree studies between 2002 and 2004.

2003, Fractals. My first fractals were born in Ada 95, for my first end-of-year project. The graphics library of the time, AdaGraph by Jerry van Dijk, was limited, and the computers of the day were far from today’s: every image had to be earned, one pixel at a time.

2004, Conway’s Game of Life. A second Ada 95 project, for my second end-of-year project, brought the same passion to Conway’s Game of Life: a game with no player. A grid of cells, a handful of rules, and the board plays itself, giving birth to gliders, guns and patterns that seem alive.

Twenty years on. The fascination never left. One line of mathematics, z → z² + c, and an endless coastline of shapes that never quite repeat; a few rules on a grid, and a universe that runs on its own.

From Ada to Rust. The code made the journey with me: from Ada 95 to WebGL and WebGPU in the browser, and finally to Rust, for a native renderer that dives deep and exports every frame in 4K or 8K at 60 frames per second.

With AI at the workbench. AI-assisted development multiplied the algorithms and lifted the rendering to a new level of detail, light and color.

Fractal art computed frame by frame and published at native 4K and 8K, 60 frames per second: deep zooms into the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, flights through Mandelbulbs, Mandelboxes and Apollonian structures, and Conway’s Game of Life.

Every video carries a code in hexadecimal: L0x for long films, S0x for Shorts, GoLx for the Game of Life. The codes count up from 00 in base 16, so S0x0F is followed by S0x10.

The iconic signature 0x46.0x58.0x50 is “FXP” written in ASCII hexadecimal.

Game Of Life.

The Endless...

The Quick.

The Nice.