I really do enjoy reading about terrain generation algorithms, I've been playing with perlin noise but haven't managed to make anything that looks realistic yet. I don't know whether you'd judge my tried and true method as realistic but I threw together a gallery for my progress on the last Ludum Dare, the gallery moves past world generation pretty quickly though.[1] The source is up on github.[2]

[1] http://imgur.com/gallery/13k1R [2] https://github.com/Lockyy/YOGO-Moment-of-Interaction