Creating Fake Landscapes

Suppose, just for a moment, that you’re writing a program that allows you to explore a planet, similar to the Earth, but completely made up. The main problem in writing such a program would be generating the terrain of the planet- all the mountains, trenches, and everything in between. Sure, you could spend years modeling the entire landscape, meter by meter, kilometer by kilometer, but it’s much easier just to write a different program to automatically generate the terrain of the planet. (The former method, in fact, would take about 16 million years, even if you could create a square meter every second, without any breaks or sleep) It turns out that it’s possible to create very realistic landscapes, even by using methods which at first would seem to have no correspondence whatsoever with how terrain forms in real life.