If you'll remember a while back, there was a contest sponsored by APress to create Mandelbrot Fractals in your favorite language. Well, here it is, about 20 days after the final submission date and we have a winner - a PHP-based winner!

After carefully examining and testing numerous submissions for the fractal contest, we have selected three winners; one winner per language group. The speedy execution of their code has earned each of them the prize of an Ipod Shuffle. Well, except for Mr. David Coakley: his code runs the fastest among all the submissions and he wins the grand prize of a Playstation Portable! We congratulate our three winners and thank all participants in the contest.

Mathias Helm was the winner in the PHP/Perl/Python/LISP category with a rendering time of 2 minutes, 28.7 seconds. He's also posted a bit on his blog about the contest and what his code was like. Personally, I'd love to see the source on this one...