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Comment by polytely | Hacker News Reader

> But curiously, none of the pieces use fancy mathematics.

> “This thing might as well have been discovered 50 years ago, but it wasn’t,” Thorup said. “That makes it that much more impressive.”

this is so cool to me, it feel like a solution you could* have stumbled upon while doing game development or something

*probably wouldn't but still

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Gamedevs -I find at least- are so obsessively deep at SOLVING their problem at hand that their headspace is indexed on shipping the game, the project, deadlines, and what to eat for the next meal (probably pizza).

Rather than the academia.

Just a hunch tho

Isn't that just it though? The problem very well could be that some part of the game is running too slow so they just start solving it. No time to read and write academic papers.

This algorithm is asymptotically faster than the state of the art, but it isn't faster in practice. At least not yet!

Somebody somewhere might be Ramanujan, but the average person is going to be a whole lot better served by reading literature than trying to reinvent the field.

I'd certainly Google for some algos before writing one myself.

Years ago, however, I came across a paper for optimal convex polygon decomposition that had zero implementations and the paper was so complicated.. couldn't figure out how to implement it myself. I came up with something new and published it which was apparently enticing enough to be picked up by at least one game library. So that was neat.

That's what I have found to be the case: time is in short supply

Maybe someone did and just didn’t see it as novel?

Depending on where you work they might not let you publish a paper about it. Certainly was the case at one game studio I worked for, very secretive.

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