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From: fournier@cs.ubc.ca (Alain Fournier)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: fractals as bad science
Message-ID: <6120@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jan 90 10:28:49 GMT
References: <119.256E54C5@uscacm.UUCP> <1247@becker.UUCP> <9144@cbmvax.commodore.com> <6780@lindy.Stanford.EDU> <10148@saturn.ucsc.edu>
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Reply-To: fournier@cs.ubc.ca (Alain Fournier)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
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In article <10148@saturn.ucsc.edu> siona@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (siona) writes:
>
>A fractal is merely a geometrical object generated through a recursive
>algorithm....

The properties of objects and of the algorithms used to generate them
can be quite different. Defining a fractal as an object generated
by recursion is wrong (even though Mandelbrot himself came close to this).
It is enough to consider that a straight line segment can be generated
by a recursive algorithm (and to call it fractal would annihilate
the class of non-fractals)  and that a Koch island can be easily computed
and plotted by iteration (the fact that it won't draw all the points
in any finite time is not an argument against the iterative method, since
the recursive one has the same problem).