The horizon problem for random surfaces
K. J. Falconer · Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 1991
Computer simulation of landscapes and skylines has recently attracted a great deal of interest: see [6, 7]. Specification of a ‘landscape’ requires a function f: D → ℝ on a subset D of ℝ2, selected so that the apparent irregularity and randomness of the surface {(t,f(t)): t ∈ D} corresponds to what might be observed in nature. It is natural to look to random fields (that is, stochastic processes in two variables), and in particular to Gaussian fields, for functions with such properties. Even when an appropriate random field has been selected, determination of a typical sample function is far from easy [7].