Fractal Blobs

This little program was written in SmalBASIC for Hi-Res PalmOS 5 only.
SmallBASIC is a free, cross-platform BASIC that runs on PalmOS, Windows, and Linux, but I wrote this for the Sony Clie, which is a PalmOS 5 device. The version of SmallBASIC for PalmOS 5 is beta, and has quite a few bugs that I've had to work around, so you will have to twiddle this a bit to get it to work on other platforms.
As far as I know, the concept for Fractal Blobs is original with me.
You can view the BASIC souce as a text file here,
or download the .pdb file for the Palm here
This program grows blobs of 1-5 colors in zooms up to 20x .
The rules are:

  1. A random pixel is checked.
  2. If black, place a blob of random size and color.
  3. If a color, place a random sized blob of that color.
Large masses of the same color merge and become more stable over time. Small blobs are consumed. Borders remain in conflict for a long time. Edges are fractal; they reveal smaller blobs expanding the borders at higher zooms.
Here are some screenshots:

blobs1 blobs2 blobs3
Blobs of several colors are seeded at random. They grow to fill the available space and overflow each other.
At this stage, the screen looks a lot like a political map.
Eventually, after thousands of iterations, one color may eventually dominate.

home  The material on this site is licensed under Creative Commons License and is copyright © 2004 by Mark R. Brown.