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From: williams@vu-vlsi.UUCP (Thomas Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: A few questions
Message-ID: <563@vu-vlsi.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-Jan-87 12:07:11 EST
Article-I.D.: vu-vlsi.563
Posted: Mon Jan 12 12:07:11 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Jan-87 19:25:37 EST
Organization: Villanova Univ. EE Dept.
Lines: 42
Keywords: fractals, color distribution, jobs


Question #2: Choosing colors 
	What's the best way to choose 256 24-bit colors from the possible
thousands (millions?!) which are used in an image.  Supposedly a method 
called 'median cut' was described in "Color image quantization for frame
buffer display", but this is an old-reference and I don't have the author's
name or publication (though it's probably Computer Graphics).  Any ideas?


Question #1:  The fractal dimension
	I have always thought that a fractal dimension of 1 caused very flat
surfaces/lines and as this dimension approaches let`s say 2 the surface
or line become irregular and jagged.  I even once remember reading that
with iteritive subdivision like in koch curves the fractal dimension equals
log(N)/log(1/r) where N is the number of sub-pieces resulting from an
iteration and r was the ratio of the size of the original piece to the
the size of the subpiece.  (So if each piece is broken into 4 pieces each
1/3 the original size the fractal dimension would be 1.26, which gives 
fairly nice results).  Anyhow, I've just looked over a paper [1] which 
describes gaussian random numbers to be chosen with a  standard deviation 
of S= k * 2**(-i*H), where i is the iteration level, k is a scale factor 
and H is the fractal dimension. If this is true then I'm totally wrong 
because a larger fractal dimension would usually create a smoother surface, 
and a smaller one a more perturbed surface.  Is this a 'different' fractal 
dimension, or what?

[1] Gavin S.P. Miller, The Definition and Rendering of Terrian Maps,
SIGGRAPH '86, Computer Graphics, Vol 20, No 4.


Question #0: 
	Do any companies hire entry-level programmers for computer graphics
work?  I haven't seen any so I'm beginning to think they only hire 
PHD's or consultants with decades of experience.  Who does most of the 
hiring anyway, hardware manufacturer's.. software companies???????!


                                     -thomas williams

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