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Fractal Fern

Frank Portman
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I’m gonna share a short code snippet that I thought was interesting. This post is inspired by one of my engineering computation classes at Rice. The program initializes a pair of coordinates ‘z’ and iteratively updates z by matrix multiplication based on some random number generation criteria. After each successive coordinate update, the new ‘z’ is plotted.

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library(ggplot2)

z <- matrix(c(0, 0), nrow = 2)
x <- c()
y <- c()

for (i in 1:40000) {

  r <- runif(1)

  if (r < .01) {
    z <- matrix(c(0, 0, 0, .16), nrow = 2, byrow = T) %*% z
  }

  else if (r < .86) {
    z <- matrix(c(.85, .04, -.04, .85), nrow = 2, byrow = T) %*% z + c(0, 1.6)
  }

  else if (r < .93) {
    z <- matrix(c(0.2, -.26, .23, .22), nrow = 2, byrow = T) %*% z + c(0, 1.6)
  }

  else {
    z <- matrix(c(-.15, .28, .26, .24), nrow = 2, byrow = T) %*% z + c(0, .44)
  }

  x[i] <- z[1]
  y[i] <- z[2]

}

qplot(x, y, size = I(.5)) + theme_bw() + opts(axis.line = element_blank(),
      axis.text.x = element_blank(), axis.text.y = element_blank(),
      axis.ticks = element_blank(), axis.title.x = element_blank(),
      axis.title.y = element_blank()) + scale_x_continuous(breaks = NULL) +
      scale_y_continuous(breaks = NULL) + ggtitle("Fractal Fern")

Pretty.

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