jarbee wrote:
> 
> Has anyone thought or heard of using a self-organizing map algorithm to
> reduce the number of polygons in a mesh?

Yes. :-)







If you have true polygon (and not only triangle like in pov), an obvious
reduction is to merge polygons which share a common border AND whose normal
at each of the border's vertex are identical in both polygons.
(Beware of polygons which share more than two vertex.)

If you only have triangles, you can try to remove vertex whose normals in all
contributed triangle is always the same and identical to the computed normal
of the triangles. 

Please notice that the use of UV mapping is a dangerous issue when performing
these operations.


> Although it may not give results as good as other algorithms, I'm thinking
> some interesting effects, could be accomplished, like combining >1 meshes,
> using "control points" to influence shape, and creating
> draped-cloth-over-object type effects.

I do not understand how you do that from the reduction of polygons in a mesh.
Moreover, we already have something called clothray...

> Meshes could also be interpolated from point density data using (almost) the
> same algorithm.

Please explain, I really have no clue what you are writing about.

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