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Nekar wrote:
> It reminds me of when I first heard of the Mandelbrot set in the late 80's.
> My first try on my 48k ZX spectrum resulted in a rather skew Mandelbrot set.
> Then I realised I had been adding a -1 in the recursion, that shouldn't be
> there... :-P
Yeah, implementing an algorithm for the very first time is always way
hard. Especially if you don't have a working reference implementation to
go from! :-S [And let's face it, those are usually in C.]
Spare a thought for me when I wrote my first ray tracer! All I had was
the POV-Ray user manual. From that, I eventually figured out that you
can find the intersections between a ray and a sphere by solving a set
of simultaneous equations. And then, I managed to work out that since
the ray equation is parametric, if you *substitute* it into the sphere
equation, you get an equation in only 1 unknown. And then I had to shift
algebra around to discover the final form of this equation. And then I
spent 4 BONEHEAD hours trying to work out how to solve this equation.
(After which, obviously, I remembered that "oh yeah, there's a formula
for that". DUH!)
And then I went upstairs and implemented it in Borland TurboPascal 5.5
for DOS, in 16-colour VGA glory. And it freakin' worked! First damn
time. I was amazed...
Yeah, it's much better if you have a reference implementation!
[Of course, today you do. Warp has kindly added one to the POV-Ray
manual. But I should emphasise that wasn't there back when I worked all
this out the hard way. Damn, if only you could get meddles or something...]
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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