XaoS

XaoS is an interactive fractal zoomer program. It allows the user to continuously zoom in or out of a fractal in real-time.

XaoS is licensed under GPL. The program is cross-platform, and is available for a variety of operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS and others.

XaoS can show the Mandelbrot set (power 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6), the Octo fractal, three types of Barnsley's fractals, the Newton fractal (order 3 and 4), Phoenix fractal and Magnet (1 and 2). XaoS can display Julia sets from selected fractal parts. Xaos also allows to enter custom formulas.

XaoS is capable of displaying fractals as ASCII art using AAlib, which, in combination with being built on freely available GNU tools, allows it to run almost anywhere.

An interactive help and an animated introduction to fractals are included. The introduction deals in ten chapters with different formulas presented in the software and their features.

Hubička algorithm

XaoS was originally just a "poorly written" Mandelbrot viewer until Jan Hubička added efficient zooming, using a technique sometimes called the XaoS algorithm or Hubička algorithm.