Fractals in 10 minutes no. 3 – The Dragon

When first I looked through the pages of the book “Hacker’s Delight”, I found myself looking at the chapter about bases. There I learned a very curious fact – with the digits of 0,1 and the base of -2, you can represent any integer. Right afterwards I learned something even more interesting – with the digits of 0,1 and the base of 1-i, you can represent and number of the form a+bi where a and b are integers. Having nothing to do with this curious fact, I let the subject go.
Some time later, I was reading through Knuth’s “Art of Computer Programming”, and found that with the base of (1-i)^-1, and digits of 0,1 you can generate the dragon fractal!

Generating the fractal is quite simple actually:

def create_dragon_set(n):
    """calculate the dragon set, according to Knuth"""
    s = set([0.0+0.0j])
    for i in range(n):
        new_power = (1.0-1.0j)**(-i)
        s |= set(x+new_power for x in s)
    return s

(By the way, can you do it better?)

The annoying part is converting the complex numbers to drawable integer points. After doing so, I used PIL to draw the jpeg.
Here’s a link to the code.