Sierpiński Triangle? In My Bitwise and?

I’m an ethusiastic promoter of the C language. One of the outmoded cultural phenomena associated with C are bit-twiddling hacks: a collection of brain-teasers that implement improbably complex algorithms using bitwise arithmetic. They are often developed under the guise of code optimization, but they mostly serve to impress your friends and confuse enemies. I have also previously written about fractals; they’re pieces of mathematical curiosa that enjoyed a near-mythical status in 1980s, but are no longer talked about in polite company. One of the better-known fractals is the Sierpiński triangle. It is constructed by taking an ordinary triangle and then successively removing the middle one-fourth from what’s left: The first steps of building the Sierpiński triangle. The fractal has some interesting properties; most notably, the surface area decreases by 25% in each iteration while the perimeter increases by 50%, so the respective limits are 0 and ∞. This is despite the figure retaini ... Read full article.