Opus 5.5 builds single-file Mandelbrot explorer diving to 10^300 in the browser
DigitalDaydreamers1 · reddit · 2026-09-25
A user had Opus 5.5 (Extra) build a browser Mandelbrot deep-zoom explorer + Conway's Game of Life in one dependency-free HTML file, diving to 10^300 (float math breaks at 10^15), with a 2-min demo.
Key techniques:
- Arbitrary-precision reference orbit with per-pixel GPU offset tracking, plus glitch-avoidance and iteration-skipping tricks.
- High-precision math in a background worker; color computed separately for instant palette/lighting changes.
- Verification against independent high-precision renders at 10^11/10^31/10^300: 99.7–100% agreement; the few "wrong" pixels were genuinely chaotic regions, not bugs.
- Profiling-driven optimizations (skip provably-interior regions, GPU work sized to measured timings, snapping the reference point onto mini-Mandelbrots, progressive half-res pass) yielded 2.4× overall speedup, up to 5.5× on interior-heavy views; one "optimization" was 3× slower and caught by benchmarking.
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