re fractals what good are they in article pdxgate uucp idr rigel cs pdx edu ian d romanick writes one thing a small change in initial conditions can cause a huge change in final conditions there are certain things about the way the plate tektoniks and volcanic activity effect a land scape that is while not entirely random unpredictable this is also true with fractals so one could also conclude that you could model this fractally yeah and it s also true most long complicated sequences of events calculations or big computer programs in general i don t argue that you can get similar and maybe useful results from fractals i just question whether you should the fractal fiends seem to be saying that any part of a system that we can t model should be replaced with a random number generator that has been useful for instance in making data more palatable to human perception or for torture testing the rest of the system but i don t think it has much to do with fractals and i certainly would rather that the model be improved in a more explicable manner i guess i just haven t seen all these earth shaking fractal models that explain and correlate to the universe as it actually exists i really hope i do but i m not holding my self similar breath there is one other thing that fractals are good for fractal image compression uh huh i ll believe it when i see it i ve been chasing fractal compression for a few years and i still don t believe in it if it s so great how come we don t see it competing with jpeg cause it can t i ll wager actually i have wagered i quit trying to make fractal compression work and i was trying because i don t think it s a reasonable alternative to other techniques it is neat though i ll reiterate my disbelief that everything is fractal that s why i don t think fractal compression as it is widely explained is practical i know barnsley and sloan have some tricks up their sleeves that make their demos work but i don t see anyone using it in a real product it s been six years since iterated systems was formed right there are always going to be questions until there s a product out there sloan replies the company plans to ship its first encoding devices in the summer he says in march iterated systems will have the other half of the system the decoders scientific american march page allen b don t even get me started
