Perlin Noise

While working on the digital imagery for Tron at MAGI in the early 1980s, Ken Perlin became interested in overcoming CGI's overly regular, machine-like appearance. In 1983, he developed a smooth procedural noise function—later published as part of his 1985 SIGGRAPH work on image synthesis—to add organic variation to computer-generated surfaces.

Although Perlin noise appears pseudo-random, its basic features have a characteristic scale. By layering it at multiple scales, artists and programmers can generate natural-looking terrain, clouds, water, smoke, textures, and animated environments.

And, yes: beautiful energy flows.

This site's thesis holds that every kind of slop is the shadow of a loss function. Perlin noise casts the shadow with no object: no corpus, no training, nothing to minimize — only a procedure, written in 1983, for making a surface look less like a machine made it. The effect is already complete here, decades before the mechanism blamed for it. Keep this specimen as the counterexample the taxonomy holds on purpose — the place where the thesis meets something it could not have caused, and has to be revised.