What he found, as the computer produced increasingly detailed pictures of this figure, was utterly unexpected: a wondrous world of beetle-shaped blobs surrounded by exploding buds, tendrils, curlicues, stylized sea horses, and dragon-like creatures, all bound together by a skein of rarefied filaments. At first he suspected that the geometric riot he was seeing was due to faulty equipment. But the more the computer zoomed in, the more precise (and fantastic) the pattern became; indeed, it could be seen to contain an infinite number of copies of itself, on smaller and smaller scales, each
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