Here we are again! For five brand new inspirational articles found on the web (mostly on Reddit to be honest, but who care). This time we will see a lot of Procedurally Contents Generation algorithms, another emulation related article, and the smallest academic paper of all time! Let’s start!
How Two Sentences Overturned 200 Years Of Mathematical Precedent
This is just the funny story of the smallest scientific paper of all time. It is also a clear indication of how computational power, even in the late 60’s, is an amazing tool for scientific research. In short: the Euler’s sum of powers conjecture, considered true since 1769, has been proved wrong by a single line counterexample computed by a CDC 6600 in the 1966. It is science, bitches. PS: Just for playing, you can try to implement the a search algorithm as the one used to find this counterexample. After all, you have better tools and better computers than the one used in the original paper. :)
Emulators 101
Yes! We still talk about emulators. I’m honestly extremely fascinated by this stuff. If the last week we have seen the experience of a developer, now I have found a complete course/book about “how to write an emulator”. The “course” is in C, so I think that a good knowledge of the basic elements of C is required. Emulators also involve a good knowledge of binary and hexadecimal code. But if you meet the requirements and you want to learn in deep how a CPU work, that’s the right way.
A really huge maze
In the field of Procedurally Generated Contents, mazes are one of the oldest and most studied applications. So, what it is new in this? Well, this guy was able to generate an amazing 262.144 x 262.144 pixels maze in 32 minutes (plus 4.2 hours to save the output to PNG). It is a 68 Giga-pixels maze. The full algorithm is in C# and it is highly optimized for huge mazes generation. There is also a 3D visualizer somewhere in the code but unfortunately I wasn’t able to find an image it.
Procedurally generated Gas Giant
Still on PCG. This time we will see something that is more inspirational than a plain maze: a procedurally generated Gas Giant. You want to know how to render a gorgeous procedurally generate copy of Jupiter (or any other gas giant, I suppose) this is the article you have to look at. The article shows how to implement the algorithm from scratch using GPU computation and a GLSL shader. It is extremely detailed, well written and illustrative. I mean… look! Images, code, GLSL snippets, video. This is the top article of the week for sure! :D
The JS Solar System
This week was a bit hard to find 5th candidate. Anyway, I’d like to post this nice web animation showing how the JavaScript ecosystem is composed. However, it is not what this animation say that is inspirational or interesting. I mean, everything it says it is something “known” by most of you. The nice thing about this is that it is made in ClojureScript. And it is open source.