Something someone said to me in a PM related to this thread got me thinking. That's always dangerous and can sometimes result in hours of time wasted on useless trivialities.
What came to my addled mind was that waaaaaaaaay back in the day when I had a 386dx, and I had lots of free time, I played around a bit with fractals. At the time the idea of generating graphics from fractal equations was actually kind of new, for the most part. There was this program, Fractint, a DOS program that could produce some really amazing images. It allowed you to zoom deep into these fractals and find some really interesting things at insane magnification levels. The software eventually incorporated logic such that it could do what they called "arbitrary precision" math. Essentially, it wasn't limited by the precision built into your computer, but could handle math with strings of numbers that were essentially of arbitrary length. Needless to say, when you were rendering a fractal and AP was engaged, the rendering slowed to a crawl. Of course, that didn't stop me. I'd set up a zoom, and walk away from my computer for a couple of days. The longest it ever took to render a single screen was about 60 hours.
At the time, I thought I was a fairly patient fellow with all this. Then years later I discovered what a truly Deep Zoom was. These guys would let a computer chug away on a render for hundreds, if not thousands of hours. On the aforementioned page, there is one mentioned called "spidrweb", that had rendered for 2413+ hours!(That's a little over 100 days!!!!!!) Yeah, I'm not nearly that patient. However, I currently do have a lot more horsepower today than I did with my scrawny 386. I've also got a multi-tasking computer that runs Linux, so it's plenty stable, and I'd be able to do other things while it ran. Looking at the Fractint page, there appears to be a fairly recent version of xfractint (which I'd tried several years ago and had been disappointed in). I downloaded, compiled and installed it. The current version does have some bugs and limitations, but seems to work pretty darned good.
So, armed with a modern fractint, and the ".par" values specified on the Deep Zoom page, I fired up fractint and let it run.
To say I was somewhat disappointed is a bit of an understatement. Using a 486dx took over a hundred days. My computer finished it in 3 hours 24 minutes. Yet again I'm mightily impressed with the advances in our computing power. It took less than 3 1/2 hours and the program is single-threaded. If the program had been designed to take advantage of all 8 cores of my processor, it would probably have taken 30 minutes. Not being much of a programmer, I can't say how much of a rewrite that would take.
Well, I guess it's time to delve deeper than I ever have before to see if I can find a level of zoom that will require a multi-day calculation....