Inspiring Fractals

I wanted to start this post by saying how great it was to see everyone at Inspire 2011. I thought it was an amazing conference and really enjoyed seeing what everyone has been doing with Alteryx over the last year.

This module was inspired by a particularly interesting conversation I had with a client at the closing reception, where we were talking about the new location optimizer macro type and then got on to talking about Fractals.  Which in turn was the inspiration for this module.

A forewarning to those of you who thought this years Grand Prix questions didn't have a direct business application, you might not appreciate this one.  For those of you who like to see the edges of what Alteryx can do then I present the Mandelbrot set produced by Alteryx.

It is actually a great example of how the iterative macro works and though lacking a "direct" business application a good learning example of this new feature.  The other point of interest is I have used the map tool with 1,000,000 size 1 points effectively as a "screen" to plot my results on (I'm sure there's a business use for this idea somewhere...).

If you want to read more about the Mandelbrot set.  Wikipedia has a good article, including the algorithm I have reproduced in Atleryx.