Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Lest I jest, I should point out that at one point I sat down and wrote
> out an algorithm for ray tracing a simple scene, optimised for hand
> computation. If you had a graph paper, a set of pencils, and a crapload
> of free time, you could in fact ray trace by hand following this
> algorithm. Jesus I was bored that day...

Reminds me of ray-tracing spheres on the old Ti-86.

This is secondhand information, but a professor told us in the hall one day
about his Russian counterpart.  Now, this was in the days when fluid dynamics
were *very* important--high-speed flight, nuclear weapons, etc...--so they had
a 'computer room' devoted to solving computational fluid dynamics problems.
This guy in particular worked on shock waves.  The computations were set up on
a one-dimensional physical grid, so each 'computer' would tackle one grid
point, do the math with pencil and paper, pass the result to his/her neighbor,
and repeat.  Mistakes were not appreciated, I'm sure, especially when they were
due to bad input.  The story was that this guy had accidentally sent a series of
problems to be computed, and changed the space- and time-resolution in such a
way that the effect was contradictory and all the work was duplicated. Imagine
a computer that gets upset when you make programming errors!  There must be
room for an "In Soviet Russia..." joke somewhere around here.

 - Ricky

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