The Polynomial
Dmytry Lavrov's PC shooter renders fractals that pulse to its soundtrack, turning a math experiment into a psychedelic space.
Playing Dmytry Lavrov’s PC space shooter The Polynomial: Space of the Music is like riding shotgun in David Bowman’s pod as it speeds through the wormhole at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey—while doing calculus and listening to Kraftwerk. The Lithuanian programmer’s game animates fractal imagery to the beat and melody of its electronic score or your own imported tracks, filling the screen with psychedelic, pulsating abstract shapes.
Fractals are shapes that can be split into parts that are similar to the whole, like snowflakes. Lavrov wrote a program to render fractals by churning through sets of random numbers until it finds a formula that produces what he calls “an ‘interesting’ shape—a shape that is chaotic and not flat.”
