Having been in the demoscene (Imphobia) for a long time and having been in more abstract (quad tree construction optimizations) stuff I can say that writing a d

Having been in the demoscene (Imphobia) for a long time and having been in more abstract (quad tree construction optimizations) stuff I can say that writing a demo is not the same as computing theory. Writing a demo is most often exploiting a very narrow area of a given technology to produce a seducing effect (more often than not, to fake something thought impossible so that it looks possible). So you're basically constraining the problem to fit your solution. On the other hand, designing pure algorithms is about figuring a solution for a given, canonical and often unforgiving problem (quicksort, graph colouring ?). To me, this is much harder. It involves quite the same amount of creativity but somehow, it's harder on your brain : no you can't cheat, no you can't linearize n² that easily :-) To take an example. You can make "convincing" 3D on a C64 in a demo because you can cheat, precalculate, optimize in various way for a given 3D scene. Now, if you want to do the same level of 3D but for a video game where the user can look at your scene from unplanned point of views, then you need to have more flexible algorithms such as BSP trees. So you end up working at the algorithm/abstract level... A very good middle ground here was Quake's 3D engine. They used the BSP engine and optimized it with regular techniques (and there they used the very smart idea of potentially visible sets) but they also used techniques found in demo's (M. Abrash work on optimizing texture mapping is a nice "cheat" -- and super clever) Now don't get me wrong, academics is not more impressive than demoscene (but certainly a bit more "useful" for the society as whole) These are just two different problems and there are bright minds that makes super impressive stuff in both of them... stF