Just listened to a segment about him on NPR, apparently his writing themes were greatly influenced by an experience he had as a child where he was standing next to someone who was killed by a lightning strike.
Definitely I have lots more to say about 15-glider universal construction! It was a really exceptionally interesting collaboration, where several people working together were able to complete something that would have taken any one person a ridiculously long time to sort out.
Development of the RCT has slowed down a bit, though there's a hyper-optimized version in the works that will build a spacefiller instead of a Hensel decimal counter as its example pattern:
There's also another long-awaited project in the works, that will use quite a bit of the same technology along with some new ideas -- a unidimensional (one cell thick) spaceship:
It's improbably complex and awkward, of course, just like an RCT pattern, and it's huge though nowhere near as huge as an RCT pattern -- but there will be one phase of the spaceship that fits in a 1xN bounding box.
Something tells me it's someone's homebrew dev of Sonic x-treme.
If it's that then the same developer also has a killer Quake style engine for the Saturn which is quite a showcase.
From the NOVA episode which gets to the human related part, (but that whyy article is on the protomammal rather than primate and thus may be of more interest to you).
> All was going as planned until McCoy’s bioinformatics specialist Steve Howes rushed into his lab in 1997 to show him the sequence of a gene they called syncytin, which their work showed was secreted by placenta tissue.
> Before McCoy could go public with his discovery, he needed to figure out exactly what syncytin did, a job he passed to bench scientist Sha Mi, who everyone called Misha. Misha’s experiments seemed to be going as planned until, a few months later, she, too, rushed into McCoy’s lab with findings of her own.
> Syncytin is produced only by certain cells in the placenta, and it directs the formation of the cellular boundary between the placenta and maternal tissue. Approximately one week after fertilization, the egg, now a hollow ball of cells called a blastocyst, implants itself into the uterus, stimulating the formation of the placenta, which provides the fetus with oxygen and nutrients while removing carbon dioxide and other wastes. It also serves as a barrier to prevent infection and keep maternal and fetal blood separate. (Mixing the two could cause a fatal autoimmune response.) The cells in the outer layer of the blastocyst form the outer layer of the placenta, and those in direct contact with the uterus are the only ones that made syncytin.
I did not notice. Neat. I appreciate the PS1 more. Remembering way back, N64 carts were 10 dollars or so more than PS1 discs, and as a result I had a stockpile of PS1 games. The texture popping of the PS1 I could never make sense of but it became an aesthetic of the era. Nice work OP, and thankyou for the credit
I know there’s another reply with videos here. I’m gonna put an explanation in text.
The N64 had two things which made things smoother. It had sub-pixel precision for geometry after projection, and it had perspective-correct interpolation. This meant that moving objects looked smooth and didn’t “pop”. Games on the PS1 addressed the interpolation problem by subdividing, but you could sometimes see geometry suddenly move when you got closer and saw more subdivisions.
The N64 also had texture interpolation (kind of like bilinear) and antialiasing, but those don’t make as big an impact.
The N64 got all these things right, more or less, but had problems with memory bandwidth and small texture memory.
Because the rest of the commentors in this thread seem to not be reading the article, there's a performance issue in Firefox due to the following unresolved bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1190398
The link to the demo comes before the warning to firefox, don't shame commenters who chose to see the content at discussion first before reading below the fold.
While it says that "[...] you need to use a Chromium or Webkit browser to enjoy MONOSPACE live." (emphasis mine), it does not say "DO NOT USE FIREFOX UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, it will mess up your device for minutes" anywhere.
We saw so many (warranted or unwarranted) "Best viewed with Chrome"-statements on the web already that we became desensitized to it years ago.
No, please don't add derision to HN threads. When someone else is wrong, it's enough to supply correct information. That enhances the thread without damaging the commons.
Missed opportunity to call it typy in my opinion