Mike Williams wrote:
> Wasn't it stbenge who wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was wondering how POV is able to render coherent noise. Is it truly 
>> infinite, or just nearly? I've never seen a repeat, but perhaps it 
>> occurs just past the limit of observation.
>>
>> I'm coding a simple demo of randomly generated topography, with the 
>> ability to scroll around the landscape. The only noise generators I've 
>> found reluctantly admit that the noise is "nearly infinite". I want an 
>> absolutely infinite landscape, but I don't know if it's even possible.
> 
> It's actually worse than that. Any finite computing system has a maximum 
> number that its arithmetic system can represent. That places an absolute 
> limit on the size of any landscape that the computer can represent, 
> whether it involves random elements or not.

Well, I just made a random landscape generator, and it's huge. I'm sure 
it repeats eventually, but I haven't seen it happen.

> It's possible to create hardware random number generators that are truly 
> random, using quantum effects, but they'd be useless for generating 
> randomly generated topology because they wouldn't produce the same 
> random numbers when you re-render the scene.

I think we are still a ways off from seeing a commercial quantum 
computer. Is there a way to achieve quantum effects apart from the 
corresponding hardware?

Sam

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