Burning Ship fractal

This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (November 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Burning Ship fractal, first described and created by Michael Michelitsch and Otto E. Rössler in 1992, is generated by iterating the function:

${\displaystyle z_{n+1}=(|\operatorname {Re} \left(z_{n}\right)|+i|\operatorname {Im} \left(z_{n}\right)|)^{2}+c,\quad z_{0}=0}$

in the complex plane ${\displaystyle \mathbb {C} }$ which will either escape or remain bounded. The difference between this calculation and that for the Mandelbrot set is that the real and imaginary components are set to their respective absolute values before squaring at each iteration.^[1] The mapping is non-analytic because its real and imaginary parts do not obey the Cauchy–Riemann equations.^[2]

Virtually all images of the Burning Ship fractal are reflected vertically for aesthetic purposes, and some are also reflected horizontally.^[3]

The below pseudocode implementation hardcodes the complex operations for Z. Consider implementing complex number operations to allow for more dynamic and reusable code.

for each pixel (x, y) on the screen, do:
    x := scaled x coordinate of pixel (scaled to lie in the Mandelbrot X scale (-2.5, 1))
    y := scaled y coordinate of pixel (scaled to lie in the Mandelbrot Y scale (-1, 1))

    zx := x // zx represents the real part of z
    zy := y // zy represents the imaginary part of z 

    iteration := 0
    max_iteration := 100

    while (zx*zx + zy*zy < 4 and iteration < max_iteration) do
        xtemp := zx*zx - zy*zy + x 
        zy := abs(2*zx*zy) + y // abs returns the absolute value
        zx := xtemp
        iteration := iteration + 1

    if iteration = max_iteration then // Belongs to the set
        return insideColor

    return (max_iteration / iteration) × color

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Burning Ship fractal.

• About properties and symmetries of the Burning Ship fractal, featured by Theory.org
• Burning Ship Fractal, Description and C source code.
• Burning Ship with its Mset of higher powers and Julia Sets
• Burningship, Video,
• Fractal webpage includes the first representations and the original paper cited above on the Burning Ship fractal.
• 3D representations of the Burning Ship fractal
• FractalTS Mandelbrot, Burning ship and corresponding Julia set generator.