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The Case of the Missing Fractals

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Fractal compression converts images consisting of random information into fractal code—saving only a small, representative amount of information that is later used to re-create the original image. Since the fractal image is now code instead of pixels, file size is drastically reduced and the image can be scaled to any size without losing its sharpness.


As a kid, I faintly remember reading one of my brother's paperback novels, wherein its author Frederik Pohl discussed (via one of its characters) how an alien message scientists encountered and studied featured the information equivalent of a vast library folded up into a simple algorithm.

What's scary is that when I try to recall what decade the book was originally published, the 1950s or early 1960s repeatedly keeps presenting itself. Hopefully that's mistaken memory, otherwise Pohl might be as prescient as Daniel F. Galouye, writing about computer simulated reality in 1963 (the year he would have actually written "Simulacron-3", if not earlier still): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3

Anyway, whatever Pohl's title was, it would probably be somewhere amongst these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_P...bliography
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