Oh, maybe! I didn't understand how it chose the points, but it does look like the random convergence approach.
Nice, thanks!
msfroh
joined 2 years ago
I'm disappointed that none of them seem to have gone with the random convergence approach.
Set the three corners of an equilateral triangle. Pick a random starting point on the canvas. Every iteration, pick a random corner from the triangle and your next point is the midpoint between the current point and that corner. While the original point is almost guaranteed not to be a point in Sierpinski's triangle, each iteration cuts the distance between the new point and the nearest Sierpinski point in half.
If you start plotting points starting with (say) the 50th one, every pixel is "close enough" to a Sierpinski point that you see the triangle materialize out of nothing. The whole thing could be programmed in about 20 lines of QBasic on DOS 30 years ago.
Ooh! There was an episode of the Past, Present, Future podcast a couple of months ago that touched on this very subject. Tariff policy was set by congress up until the Smoot-Hawley act, which was considered such garbage that they decided that it should be left to the executive.
Back when it was a congressional power, it was also the source of some of the worst horse-trading, as representatives from rural areas would seek protection on agricultural imports (with low tariffs on imported machinery), while representatives from manufacturing areas would seek to lower food prices and increase the cost of imported manufactured goods.
Edit: Not saying that handing it to the executive is the best plan, as we can see by what's going on now, but letting congress do it was also problematic. It's funny how a lot of us grew up with the idea that no/low tariffs are the natural order, when it's actually been a fairly short-lived anomaly in historical terms.