The image to the right that looks like a alien critter is a mathematical artifact. I have dubbed it the "Gravity Creature", because it is the result of using Newtonian gravity, Eulerian integration, and lots of raw computation.

I have recently added Gallery #2. The 2nd and 3rd rows on the right are from that gallery.

MGGS fractals are generated in a similar fashion to how the Mandelbrot Set is generated; outside of zooming and tweaking the color palette, no other manipulations are done to create these fractals. Their beauty emerges directly from the equations themselves.

The initial idea for this came from a colleague, Chris Green, in 1992 at Commodore-Amiga before the company went belly-up. Green and I were two out of 3 of the graphics "hot-shots" at that company. He initially implemented the gravity set in Forth. Those initial images were a bit crude, but showed great promise, which spurred me on to re-implement it with a dedicated program - written in C on the Amiga, with a GUI front end - so that I could explore this phenomenon more closely.

After implementing this jewel, I played around with the parameters quite a bit, and did a lot of zooming, etc. One day, I zoomed in on a particular patch and the Gravity Creature appeared on the screen. Astonished, I quickly spread the news about it all over Commodore. Many were delighted to see such a thing, but did not have the mathematical acumen to comprehend what was going on. Those that did criticized me of not implementing the equations right (they were, but I think they had problems with the vector form of the equations), but it "produced pretty pictures anyway". Arrgh!

Then, in April of 1992 Commodore began the first of its death-throes. One third of the staff was laid-off, including myself. I quickly forgot about this gem as more immediate concerns came to occupy my mind - getting a new job. Since I had been at Commodore for nearly 5 years doing exclusively Amiga development, I had to do some serious (and painful) mid-stream horse-changing.

Once things settled down, I decided to return attention back to the Gravity Set. I wrote a Windows NT/95 version of the program (dubbed MGGS, for Mitchell-Green Gravity Set) back in 1994, and was partially completed, but I lost time to finish it. It was based on the ill-fated MFC library, which Microsoft revved many times in a not-so-backwards compatible fashion. That program no longer compiles properly, and I have lost interest in maintaining that version. I did manage to snag a few images off of that version, and some of those images surrounding this text that you see here.

Many years past. Spin forward to 2003.

I have gotten very interested in Linux, have grown to loathe Windows, and run Linux as much as possible, occasionally popping back to Windows just to do mundane tasks such as running web authoring tools and play certain Windows-based games. I do have the dubious distinction of being a Win32 guru, and it is exactly my in-depth knowledge of Windows internals that makes me loath that OS all the more. So I currently do my free development on Linux.

As such, the new MGGS has re-emerged from the ashes of the former. Now completely re-written from scratch under Linux using the Qt library, MGGS is slicker than ever before. Also, in the intervening decade, PCs have grown enormously in raw processing power. As such, I have used the new MGGS to create very large -- 2K x 2K -- maps, which are located on the far right of this page.

Now jump to 2005. Gallery #2 are new images I have created since the last gallery. The stunning maps created only illustrate I am nowhere near exhausting the beauty to be found in MGGS.

Will I make the new Linux MGGS available? Yes, when I get a chance to complete it. Non-FOSS Software for Windows does exist and can be found at Softology. If you are interested in doing a FOSS port, contact me. Since it is based on the Qt library, the port should be relatively easy.

The thumbnails of the Gravity Set images link to "full-sized" images created with the MGGS program. Click on the thumbnails to download the complete images. Most images are 1024x768 JPEGs, 60k to 1000k each. The Galleries are more comprehensive, with some of the maps being rather large. Each thumbnail is marked with the dimension and size of of each map.