Fit An Entire Planet In 90k

missingmatterboy points out this "interview with Dr. Ken "Doc Mojo" Musgrave, a computer graphics pioneer who worked with Benoit Mandelbrot generating fractal landscapes and who's designed custom shaders for Hollywood movies. His latest project is called MojoWorld and it uses the power of math to generate infinite-resolution fractal landscapes? one entire planet at a time. It's going to have an open SDK and, to top it all off, a Linux version is also in the works." This is a fascinating project.

Just have to wonder...

[merlin_jim]

I just wonder how big their problem space is, and does it conform to the genetic algorithm definition of "smooth"... the existance of sliders would seem to indicate that this is so.

Smooth may be defined as:

• function: all genotypes code for valid phenotypes
• injective (compact, nonredundant): different genotypes lead to different phenotypes
• surjective (universal): all phenotypes are representable
• continuous: small variations in the genotype produce small variations in the phenotype
• inversely continuous: small variations in the phenotype can be induced by small variations in the genotype

Where genotype refers to the parameters and phenotype to the representation of the world.

If this were true, then one could theoretically evolve (using GA techniques) a planet that is a reasonable facsimile of earth, or any other feature set. Want a detailed map of San Francisco Bay? Let me squirt my survey through my Genetic Algorithm MojoWorld Compression Algorithm. Oh good, it's done. Use these five numbers to recreate the map...

Hmmm... sounds like it's plausible, but I don't think that small changes in the genotype necessarily result in small changes in the phenotype.

Far out

[Dyolf Knip]

I tried zooming out to a few thousand km to try and get a good full planet view and was rather disappointed. Only two terrain features were still visible (green and snow); nearly all the lakes and rivers had vanished and there were no large bodies of water no matter how high I set the water level. Didn't look anything at all like a planet when it had finished rendering.