Apophysis is an open source fractal flame editor and renderer for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh.

Scott Draves invented Fractal Flames and published an open source implementation written in C in the early 90s.

And in 2003 or 2004 Mark Townsend took Ronald's code and added a graphical user interface to create Apophysis.

Apophysis then generates the attractor of this set of functions, by means of Monte-Carlo simulation.

Apophysis supports a plugin API so that new variations can be independently developed and distributed.