As I was coding Conway's Life onto my recently bought TI-89, as a follow-up to doing a prime numbers program (shown as an Ulam's Spiral), I had the thought that "Life" must be the "Chopsticks" or "Fur Elise" of Real Computer Programmers-- /anyone/ can do a "Hello World", but only those people who're committed programers ever know about (and implement) examples of Conway's Life on a system they're learning about.
What other programs can people suggest would fit in that category? (I haven't know many others who do my personal Sieve of Erastothenes 'hello world'..) A Mandelbrot calculator is probably another example...
Conway's Game of Life and the Towers of Hanoi solver are too simple, I've seen them done in CS101 classes.
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Anonymous2006-08-11 16:05
>>3
I've always wanted to write one... what's stopping me is... how many rays do I trace :X?
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Anonymous2006-08-11 16:26
>>5
As many as you want. One per pixel is preferred though because otherwise you'll be doing something weird like averaging together the return color of rays, and everything will be blurry.
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Anonymous2006-08-11 16:27
*At least one per pixel.
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Anonymous2006-08-12 0:22
>>3
But almost every first-year-dropout Arts student has heard of Raytracing, and I once did a 2nd-year Maths Geometry subject that covered all the basic theory (sans surface properties & etc., but enough). "Conway's Game of Life" and "Towers of Hanoi" are examples that're practically only known to Programmers..
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Anonymous2006-08-12 0:48
>>8
Have you ever actually programmed a raytracer though? It requires enough time to show that you have some skill in the language you wrote it in. I heard about Game of Life and Towers of Hanoi a long time before I ever seriously programmed. Towers of Hanoi is in a lot of video games too, I know it was one of the final puzzles in Kyrandia: Hand of Fate.
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Anonymous2006-08-12 4:10
>Towers of Hanoi is in a lot of video games too
Ah, you're right there.
>Have you ever actually programmed a raytracer though?
COMP380, Final Year Computer Graphics, 1992... Using Black & White XTerms to render internally 48-bit images was ;_;
A bogo-raytraced sphere (not actually photon-traced; just dot-products from the light) was one of the toy programs I wrote on the "Pascal" Unix machine for MATH1A/1989... which had _VT52_ (clone) terminals... I managed to get an animated "moon rise" happening within the 1,000,000 instructions limit.. Yes, in ASCII graphics.. :/
Life is an interesting little cellular automata. It's pretty computer-sciency.
The program I personally use to verify basic competency within a language or environment is an implementation of the core huffman compression algorithm.