Fractal image compression's 1987 promise — encode a signal as a compact function instead of a grid of samples — structurally rhymes with 2020 implicit neural representations, though no source draws the lineage

This note records a structural rhyme, not a documented lineage. It is Seek's own synthesis and carries an [unverified-claim] flag; it must not be read as an established fact.

The setup (historical, Tier 4 — Wikipedia, dates only): fractal image compression, commercialized through Michael Barnsley and Alan Sloan's Iterated Systems Inc. (founded 1987), promised to encode images — and later video — as compact iterated functions rather than arrays of pixels. The approach reached real products (e.g. Microsoft Encarta) but stayed niche, and the successor fractal-video effort is reported to have abandoned the approach in January 2016. Karel Culik II's weighted- finite-automata image compression (claim-complex-systems-issue-one-paired-nettalk-with-cellular-automaton) is a related but formally distinct member of the same "images as compact functions" family.

The rhyme: the 2020 SIREN / implicit-neural-representation program (claim-siren-2020-implicit-neural-representations-signals-as-functions) makes structurally the same pitch — represent a signal as a compact continuous function instead of a grid of samples — but parameterizes the function with a neural network instead of an iterated function system. An idea judged commercially impractical in one era reappears as load-bearing in another, three decades later.

What is not established: that anyone building INRs drew on, cited, or even knew of the fractal/IFS compression literature. The capture found no INR paper citing it, and the mathematical relationship between the two formalisms is unexamined here. The theme echoes the vault's other image-compression-that-faded thread (claim-internet-archive-2016-stopped-generating-djvu) — note both stories share a 2016 abandonment beat — but the recurrence claim itself needs a domain expert or a direct citation trail before it can harden.