10 ms·
Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan Win Turing Award
- m12k 7y agoDoes that mean we can conclusively say they are human?
- chrisseaton 7y agoThat's the Turing Test. This is the Turing Award - it's an academic achievement award. They're just named after the same person - they're not related otherwise.
- DubiousPusher 7y agoI think the OP knows this already.
- denzil_correa 7y agoIt's most likely a cheeky dig.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoYou just failed both! :).
- chrisseaton 7y agoThe Turing Award isn't a test - you can't fail it any more than you fail to win a Nobel Prize.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoObviously have never had Asian parents
- pvg 7y agoIt's a prize Turing got for inventing a machine that lets you compute anything using only toilet paper.
- logicchains 7y agoNo, we can say they're human or an artificial general intelligence.
- mdre 7y agoCool, maybe Ed could split his part between all the workers he exploited.
- tomashubelbauer 7y agoI didn't know about this so I looked it up: > The plaintiffs in the lawsuit presented substantial evidence that implicated Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios president Ed Catmull as a ringleader of the illegal wage-fixing scheme. The Walt Disney Company has done nothing to reprimand or punish Catmull for his questionable actions, and he continues to serve as the leader for both Disney and Pixar animation studios. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/animation-workers-set-to-receive-170-million-payout-from-wage-theft-lawsuit-161482.html https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/animation-workers-... Pretty damning if true. Anyone got a better/additional source?
- chadcmulligan 7y agoDisney has a long history of exploiting their workers financially, conversely the workers have a long history of loving working for Disney. It's a strange symbiotic relationship.
- pixelpoet 7y agoSounds a lot like Apple, that other Steve Jobs company.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y agoWorking at one's "dream job" is an easy way to be taken advantage of, sadly.
- chadcmulligan 7y agoindeed, I know one guy in particular that really stands out for me - he's working as an editor and hasn't been paid in years, they keep saying 'they're getting investors' then they'll pay him, his parents are giving him money. One of the many reasons I'm not in the vfx industry - how do you compete with people that are willing to work for free.
- taneq 7y agoBack when I was a wee young graphics programmer I taught myself to use Catmull-Rom splines to interpolate between camera positions (among many other things) for some stuff I was doing. Great to see one of the inventors getting recognition of all the cool stuff he's done!
- DubiousPusher 7y agoI thought for years they were invented by three people, Cat, Mull and Rom.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ihaveajob 7y agoNice to see computer graphics pioneers being recognized. Reading Ed Catmull's name always brings fond memories of learning mesh processing techniques they first thought of, like the Catmull-Clark subdivision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2%80%93Clark_subdivision_surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2%80%93Clark_subdivis...). Elegant stuff.
- pixelpoet 7y agoI think the later development of mixed triangle/quad subdivision by Warren and Schaefer is even more elegant, besides being more general: http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/schaefer/research/tutorial.pdf http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/schaefer/research/tutorial.pdf
- ihaveajob 7y agoAh, the Stanford bunny. It's been a decade since I last worked with it in grad school, but I can't help feeling fond for the little guy. We spent hours and hours of frustration together.
- phtrivier 7y agoSo now, Disney also wins Turing Award. Can't wait for anything that's not an excuse for showing ads to earn recognition.
- caleb-allen 7y agoDisney didn't win anything. Catmull and Hanrahan have had an incredibly large impact on computer graphics.
- phtrivier 7y agoOf course. Sometimes you don't sleep enough, write stupid comments, and wonder why HN does not always show a 'delete' button.
- caleb-allen 7y agoFair enough!
- ur-whale 7y agoCatmull reminds me of Fritz Haber [1] in that he both invented amazingly useful tech. while being an absolutely horrible human being. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
- medecau 7y agoAre you comparing chemical-warfare to wage-fixing?
- aspaceman 7y agoProbably the systematic sexual harassment he enabled at Pixar is the thing being compared to. Dude’s a shithead in more ways than one.
- jansan 7y agoFritz Haber is such a tragic character. Saved the world from hunger by inventing the process for ammonium fertilizer, helped to kill thousands by being a central figure in building up German chemical weapons for WWI, tried to extract gold from seawater to pay Germany's WWI debt but of course failed. He was a huge patriot, but being a Jew, he had to go on exile to England, where he died.
- mikhailfranco 7y agoA nod to the graciousness of England, not just for accepting him as a refugee, but for those former military enemies and chemical warfare competitors, who actively helped him by offering a position at Cambridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber#Death
- denzil_correa 7y ago> In the early 1970s, Dr. Catmull was a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah under one of the founding fathers of computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland. Off topic - I had an opportunity to meet and spend time with Ivan Sutherland, also a Turing award winner [0]. Ivan was one of the most "fun" scientists I have met and spoken with. His conversations were full with humor and humility. I was walking past the street where Ivan (he insisted to call me that) was having a coffee. He asked me if I'd like to join him for one - pleasantly surprised, I said yes. The next 45m was Ivan telling me about a research problem he was working on and asking "tips" on how I would solve it. Initially, I was hesitant but he insisted and took me along a journey inside his wonderful mind. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland
- mentos 7y agoI recommend Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc about the founding of Pixar.
- locallost 7y agoRecently read it. The first part of how Pixar came to be was really really interesting. From his days in research to Lucas Arts/Film to Jobs. The rest was also a good read. I also recommend it. edit: and then a couple posts later I read, of course, things are never as they seem. Depressing.
- greggman3 7y agoWhat I got from the book is how much luck was involved (which Mr. Catmull acknowledges). If Lucas had not sold them. If Lucas had sold them to someone other than Steve Jobs. If Steve Jobs had not been willing to blow 70 million on them as a computer company. If Steve Jobs had not allowed them to pivot to animation after blowing 70 million on them as a computer company. If any one of those things had not happened Pixar would likely not exist and Mr. Catmull would likely just be another employee of some other company.
- albertkoz 7y agoSame for me... I just have finished the book and found it very very inspiring until I saw the posts here.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoGreat book. If the history lessons don't get you, the leadership/management insights will. It should be required reading for anyone with aspiration in tech / creative fields.
- micmil 7y agoDid it include anything about him screwing hundreds of people out of work and money by forging an illegal deal with other VFX houses to blacklist people that wanted to change jobs for better pay and treatment?
- lincpa 7y agoI think "The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow v3.0 with Warehouse/Workshop Model" should win the "Turing Award". 1. Perfectly defeat other messy and complex software engineering methodologies in a simple and unified way. 2. Realize the unification of software and hardware on the logical model. 3. Achieve a leap in software production theory from the era of manual workshops to the era of standardized production in large industries. 4. The basics and the only way to `Software Design and Develop Automation (SDDA)`, SDDA is an innovative and revolutionary approach to develop large-scale software, just like `Electronic Design Automation (EDA)`. https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Keyframe 7y agoHanrahan absolute beast of a mind. Work at Stanford, RSL, and tableau. Absolutely deserves it. Catmull escaped prison I guess? Great work though.
- corysama 7y agolol. I came here to type “Hanrahan is a beast.” He has been involved with so much impressive work for so many years. I don’t know how he does it.
- ohazi 7y agoI had the good fortune of taking Hanrahan's introductory computer graphics class at Stanford several years ago. He's a great teacher and the class was a lot of fun. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy as well. Congratulations!
- tayistay 7y agoHaving worked at Pixar, I think Catmull's wage-fixing involvement should absolutely disqualify him from receiving the Turing Award. And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing. Z-buffering is obvious. Those were the days of low hanging fruit in graphics.
- micmil 7y agoIt's rather interesting that his Wikipedia page no mention of this, nor does the one for Pixar.
- pcwalton 7y ago> And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing. And the fact that Catmull-Clark is based on recursive refinement makes it really bad for GPU evaluation (or parallel evaluation in general). It's completely incompatible with hardware tessellation, for example. If I had to pick an especially non-obvious, elegant, and useful 1980s graphics technique, Pineda rasterization would come to mind.
- tayistay 7y agoSubdivision surfaces aren't so bad on the GPU. Since each limit vertex is a linear combination of control vertices, you can precompute the stencils to evaluate limit vertices. Those stencils can all be evaluated in parallel in a compute kernel. Generally, the base mesh topology isn't changing in an animation, so this works fairly well. For Catmull-Clark, the regular parts of the mesh (quads with valence 4 vertices) are just b-splines and thus can be evaluated using the hardware tessellator.
- peapicker 7y agoCan we link to the ACM award site and its article instead of the NYT paywall? https://amturing.acm.org/ https://amturing.acm.org/
- dang 7y agoThe NYT article has some additional context, including quotes from interviews. Generally we prefer an article like that to press releases, unless it's an unusually interesting press release. Paywalls suck, of course, but HN's rule is that it's ok as long as there's a workaround. Users usually post workarounds in the threads, including in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20paywalls%20suck&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- drallison 7y agoPat Hanrahan is a friend and colleague at Stanford. For years, he occupied the office next door in the Gates Building. He's smart and insightful, gracious, thoughtful, well spoken, and open--social virtues which amplify intellectual skills. While the Turing Award cites his work in computer graphics, he has made significant contributions is other areas.
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/mAhJd https://archive.md/mAhJd
- lostinroutine 7y agoFor those troubled by the paywall: it doesn't appear if you disable javascript. I used my uBlock origin to do so.
- NelsonMinar 7y agoHas Catmull changed his opinion on his participation in illegally colluding with Google, Apple, etc to keep employee wages low? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/apple-google-no-poaching-evidence-triggers-more-lawsuits https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/apple-goo...
- alanbernstein 7y agoFor extremely high values of "low"...
- glitchdout 7y agoCollusion is collusion. By keeping salaries lower at the tech giants, they kept salaries lower in the whole tech industry.
- skrebbel 7y agoHuh? Wages in SF bay skyrocketed in the years after the wage fixing scheme got busted. I'm not sure what you're on about.
- mehrdada 7y agoThat's just... your opinion. The wage gap between CEO and leaf in the tech industry is not better than Walmart.
- musicale 7y agoI kind of wish ACM had mentioned the names of Pat Hanrahan's grad student(s) who worked on Brook, the predecessor of Nvidia's CUDA. Though they did mention Marc Levoy, his Stanford colleague and coauthor on the light field paper.
- flafla2 7y agoI recently implemented Levoy & Hanrahan in a game engine—a genuinely great read and easy to digest. One of my favorite papers in CG/Comp Photo.
- gregfjohnson 7y agoPat Hanrahan and I were CS grad students at the University of Wisconsin Madison at the same time. In addition to being brilliant, Pat was kind, egoless, and infectiously happy. He was just a fun person to be around. I haven't seen Pat since grad school days, but I'm sure it's as true now as it was then! Amusing side note: Brian Paul, who wrote the mesa open source implementation of OpenGL, was a Wisconsin grad student at the same time! He was in the meteorology department, in the building across the street from computer science.
- lincpa 7y agoWhy flagged and hide my comments? 1. HN does not allow free speech 2. HN does not allow to challenge authority 3. HN suppresses innovation 4. HN lacks the ability to appreciate technology and must use more technically competent administrators. --------- My comment: I think "The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow v3.0 with Warehouse/Workshop Model" should win the "Turing Award". 1. Perfectly defeat other messy and complex software engineering methodologies in a simple and unified way. 2. Realize the unification of software and hardware on the logical model. 3. Achieve a leap in software production theory from the era of manual workshops to the era of standardized production in large industries. 4. The basics and the only way to `Software Design and Develop Automation (SDDA)`, SDDA is an innovative and revolutionary approach to develop large-scale software, just like `Electronic Design Automation (EDA)`. https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
- kristianov 7y agoIMHO Pat deserves another Turing Award for creating Tableau.
- sitkack 7y agoPat Hanrahan is a wonderful soul. I talked to him after a talk he gave and he was super nice and not judgmental. I don't have the same opinion about Ed Catmull. His wage fixing really saddened me. To remove agency from peoples lives for profit of Pixar is an unconscionable act. He curtailed lives for his own gain.