Pseudofractals! Accidental aesthetics where math meets pixels
summary
A recurring glitch proves to be a concrete phenomenon: sampling limits create persistent aliasing artifacts from simple formulas, explained with the Nyquist limit and demonstrated on a dot matrix printer and modern canvases. Short programs reproduce it — a 186‑character WebGL shader and 140‑char JavaScript sketches animate the patterns — and experiments show surprising optical illusions, novel color percepts, and repeatable pseudofractal motifs that reliably render when run.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Start
- 0:302012, jes, Spectrogram
- 1:432005, Craig Kaplan, Voronoi diagrams
- 2:012005, Craig Kaplan, "Voronoi" patterns
- 2:181986, Brian Hayes, Topographic maps
- 3:53the Nyquist limit
- 4:28Nyquist limit, square waves vs pixels
- 4:57parabolic surface, zooming out
- 5:33hyperbolic surfaces
