3 ms·

So, Lionel knew how to implement a 3D Renderer, but had no clue about O(n) complexity neither other sorting algorithms? I am buffled

• fn_t_b_j 4y ago
• im3w1l 4y ago
  That's self-taught for you. Will know some advanced stuff, and miss some basics depending on what they found interesting or useful.
• touisteur 4y ago
  Well, Hi there, it me. Back then I was 17 and wading through software rendering so (light) mesh tessellation, triangle projection (twice, for a stereoscopic anaglyph renderer), triangle filling, texture mapping, with at most 300 objects, all in crappy crashy C (first with VESA, then SDL eased my life...) with lots of misunderstandings about pointers. I was welllll over my head with complex stuff, and sorting didn't appear in the profiles, so... I guess you can call that profile-guided learning? I had the formal training, later on, and even then it didn't stick until I faced the actual complexity problem head-on. I'll never forget that whole weekend with my AMD Athlon 900 at 100% CPU sorting a 200 000 words dictionary... It was still not finished on Monday. Implemented (a very primitive) insertion sort and it was done in less than 2 minutes... That was my 10000-a-day day https://xkcd.com/1053 https://xkcd.com/1053
• Agingcoder 4y ago
  The exact same thing happened to me, and this is how I discovered algorithmic complexity. Sorting my triangles took forever (I saw it in the profile, taking a whopping 90% of the time ) and I eventually figured there might be a proper sorting algorithms out there. I was at the same time happily churning out assembly code, talking to the vga card, writing a dos extender, etc. You can actually do quite a few things without formal education!