Question: What else have you discovered while doing computer programming

Ian Stephenson answered on 25 Jun 2014:

All sorts of things – not all them interesting or useful!

I’ve studied the a lot about randomness, and how you make things change in a controlled way. I’ve written code to simulate light hitting a sheet of old photographic film. I figured out ways of drawing smoke. I worked out how to save disk space when you’re making a movie. I did a project with the guy who was in charge of lighting for Micheal Jackson concerts. I’ve worked with set designers to help them visualise theatre shows (it was odd seeing the show and they’d used some of the thing I’d done as placeholders, expiating the artists to replace them!). I’ve written a couple of books about how rendering software works. I simulated pinhole camera, and from that did some crazy maths that linked optics to sampling theory, and quantum mechanics (that was pretty cool if totally useless!).

I’m currently working on a system to make it easy for K3 children to program robots (and I just used it to make a mobile phone). http://www.sniff.org.uk