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Re:Fractional Brownian Motion for Terrain Generation by vanderZwan on Monday October 07, 2019 @07:38AM (#21179618)
> These movements define paths that are random yet (statistically) selfsimilar, ie, a zoomed-in version of the path resembles the whole path

This goes a bit against my intuition of self-similar, but I guess I should interpret "resembles" as *statistically resembles" here as well? Does it mean something like the distribution being the same at all zoom levels?

Re:Fractional Brownian Motion for Terrain Generation by arketyp on Monday October 07, 2019 @07:53AM (#21179709)
There is a visual resemblence between zoom levels because of the statistical self-similarity across zoom levels. I suppose the word resemblence was chosen by the author as a less strict variation of the concept. But even the self-similarity of for instance the convergence border of the Mandelbrot set isn't completely self-same either.
Re:Fractional Brownian Motion for Terrain Generation by benogorek on Monday October 07, 2019 @11:10AM (#21181760)
Yeah if you were to discretize it, then you'd get random walks with the only difference being the variance of movement from the last point. Wish I could find this one source that talked about continuous time noise processes - it was pretty interesting. If you assign a random variable to every point t on a continuum, it's not a real process (in terms of the definitions set forth in Measure Theory), so you have to use other methods to define them, like limits of discrete processes.
Re:Fractional Brownian Motion for Terrain Generation by swiley on Monday October 07, 2019 @08:33AM (#21180001)
You should read Mandelbrot’s book “the fractal geometry of nature.” He talks quite a bit about ideas like this. It’s written with the intention that non mathematicians can read and understand the ideas too which is kind of neat.
Re:Fractional Brownian Motion for Terrain Generation by taneq on Monday October 07, 2019 @07:52AM (#21179702)
Well yeah, that's the "(statistically) selfsimilar" bit. Random fractals like this aren't self-congruent, just self-resembling.