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Maybe I've been in computer graphics land for too long, but I'm somewhat surprized by the author's initial surprize. Isn't it obvious that you get a fractal surface if you sum up frequencies with 1/f amplitude?

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Nothing about computer graphics, I think everyone who has worked with signal processing would be surprised by the authors initial surprise (I was). The question is more what else would one expect?

And for people like me, unfamiliar with it but still knowing what a Fourier transform is, just reading the algorithm I really see no reasons why it particularly "shouldn't work", as the author said.

Indeed.

I suspect perhaps the author is surprised because squinting/defocussing your eyes at the original noise doesn't much look like the final result.

Thats because as well as removing the high frequency components (like squinting), this algorithm also is rescaling the amplitude.

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