Hello,

I am a biologist working with slime moulds that appear (to my eye, anyway) to be approximately fractal. I would like to quantify this observation, but realised I don't know of any test that will quantify whether or not my critter counts as fractal. I have been using fractal dimension, D (used box-counting method) to quantify growth under different conditions. So I have two real questions:
1. How do you quantitatively know that some object is fractal?
2. Can you use fractal dimension for objects that fail the test (assuming there is one)?

Thank you in advance for your help!!
Cheers,
Dragonfly

Hello and welcome,

If your slime moulds are fractal then you may find that different varieties of slime mould will have distinct fractal dimension values when the box counting algorithm is applied - which could be a useful tool for identification purposes - then again all slime moulds may exhibit the same fractal dimension

It's possible that the closest fractal algorithm to slime mould growth is "Diffusion Limited Aggregation" - see:

http://mx.coldstorageonline.com/index.php?bid=53

bye
Dave