The speaker explains how he came up with the idea to efficiently draw video game graphics by using the hardware designed for text output and how this technique played a big role in his later work at id software. He also notes that without proper programming, this technique would result in a slow and unfun experience.
In the early days of computing, programs like Oregon Trail were created by writing basic programming language on paper and sending it off via cumbersome bubble cards to be read by an IBM microcomputer in the cloud. Despite the difficulties, this represented true cloud computing and allowed for remote programming and computing.
In the early days of video games, developers had to find clever ways to optimize graphics for speed due to hardware limitations. This included creating separate programs specifically optimized for certain image sizes and implementing compiled shapes to improve efficiency.
In this podcast transcript, the guest talks about his experience with programming and how it enabled him to build complex things without requiring any physical materials. He also discussed how he had to rely on dumpster diving to find resources for his electronics projects.
Numba is a compiler for Python that produces optimized machine code for loops and array operations. It is designed to speed up Python functions that use NumPy arrays.
The principle of computational equivalence states that whenever a system follows rules, if it’s not doing something that is obviously simple, then the computation that the behavior of the system corresponds to is of equivalent sophistication. This principle is at the heart of the definition of computation.