Ie, is there a way to probe it for regions of depth that involves a function, the domain of which is the Mandelbrot set itself, or a part of that set?



Is there a way to find regions of depth in the Mandelbrot set other than simply poking around?
It is a little bit difficult to answer the question as posed, because there is a question as to what you mean by "depth".


One of the previous answers mentions Misiurewicz points - parameters where the critical orbit is pre-periodic. Examples are the "branch points" and "tips" in the Mandelbrot set. However, these are not likely to be good candidates for what you are looking for. Indeed, rescalings of the Mandelbrot set near such a parameter will converge, with the same limit as corresponding rescalings in the dynamical plane, by a theorem of Tan Lei. This does not seem like what you are looking for.


If you pick a "Feigenbaum point" (an infinitely renormalizable parameter of bounded type, such as the famous Feigenbaum value which is the limit of the period-2 cascade of bifurcations), then Milnor's hairiness conjecture, proved by Lyubich, states that rescalings of the Mandelbrot set converge to the entire complex plane. So there is certainly a lot of thickness near such a point, although again this may not be what you are looking for. It may also prove computationally intensive to produce accurate pictures near such points, because the usual algorithms will end up doing the maximum number of iterations for almost all points in the picture.


In this case you are left with either non-renormalizable parameters (those that do not belong to any small copies of the Mandelbrot set) or infinitely renormalizable parameters with interesting behaviour.


An example of the formal is given by the so-called "Fibonacci parameter"; see "Parameter scaling for the Fibonacci point" by Wenstrom for information (and a picture) about the parameter space structure near this point. Rodrigo Perez investigated the structure of parameter space near such pieces in much more detail. 


To imagine creating a zoom sequence for infinitely renormalizable parameters, imagine the following: Begin with a Misiurewicz parameter c\_0. Then pick a little Mandelbrot copy M\_1 near c\_0, and choose a Misiurewicz point c\_1 in this little copy. Pick a little Mandelbrot copy M\_2 very close to c\_1, and again a Misiurewicz point c\_2 in there, and so on. Zooming in on the limit parameter is essentially the same as zooming in to the Misiurewicz parameter c\_0, then changing track and zooming into the little Mandelbrot copy M\_1, centering on c\_1, and so on. Of course instead of using Misiurewicz points, you could at various types use any other types of points that are on the boundary of the Mandelbrot set (boundary points of interior components, Feigenbaum parameters, etc).


