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.

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.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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