I just scanned the sci.fractals newsgroup for the past few weeks and found this post from Brian Quincy Hutchings <QncyMI@netscape.net>, dated 19 september 2003 23:27: <snip> but folks should know that the "universality of the M-set," that is the recurrence of "mini-bugs" or cardioids, at every level of "magnification," is just an artifact of the floating-point ops (IEEE-755, -855, I think). this was (really/partially) confirmed by monsieur M, when he glroriously begged my (only) technical question at a talk for a "general audience." <snip> Is this just some "besserwisser"-talk or might it imply that images containing minibrots/midgets (and there certainly are a *lot* of those on the Net and in the litterature) are just artifacts from some weird bug in the floating-point algorithms? The fact that the main cardoid itself stems from a very simple formula make it seem, if not probable so at least possible, that some oddities in the FPU could produce unexpected results. I find this a bit disturbing. Could anyone please care to comment? Regards Kenneth Lifvenborg _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail