Research Projects

Try the suggestion below, design your own, or write an essay using any of the questions throughout this unit as inspiration.

Blaze has some advanced features that permit further investigations on your own:

1. The burned trees display can be saved as a picture. It can also be exported as a file for the separate Fractal Dimension program. This allows you to measure the fractal dimension of the burned portions of different forests grown with various probabilities. This collection of save commands are available under the File menu.


2. Instead of starting the fire from the left, the fire can be started by random lightning strokes, using the command Random Lightning under the Mode menu. Lightning falls on a randomly-chosen unburned tree. The fire then burns all connected trees grouped together in that cluster. When that cluster is entirely burned, lightning falls on another randomly-chosen unburned tree. This continues until all trees are burned. A command in the Mode menu gives different colors to different clusters, making it easier to distinguish them from one another. A graph called Cluster Sizes available under the Windows menu plots the number of clusters of various sizes.

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