I completely love the field of computer science. I keep rediscovering this fact. Today, on the way home from work, I was pondering what it meant for a set to be recursively enumerable but not recursive. The trick of using many different turing machines, on a ‘time share’ basis, all working to verify members of your recursively enumerable set, is pretty sweet.
I spent most of this evening working on my senior research project, which is a study of ‘Procedural Content Generation.’ That’s the process of using mathematical rules and computer code to generate computer graphics, instead of having an artist draw it. The kind of work people are doing is absolutely amazing. The neat thing is that when someone wants to write an algorithm to draw realistic clouds, they get to go and study what clouds are, how they form, and how they move about. Some other algorithms that I was reading about are based upon biological models.
The fact that studying how spots form on leopards, how clouds form, and what kinds of problems we can efficiently solve are all considered part of the same glorious field makes me giddy. I can’t believe how lucky I am that I can study pretty much anything that interests me, and so long as I take a mathematical approach to the things I’m studying, I can put on my ‘computer scientist’ hat (and keep whatever job I eventually get as a computer scientist.)
If you have access to the ACM digital library (If you’re a college student, most likely you can visit it through your library’s website), you simply must read the paper “A Simple, Efficient Method for Realistic Animation of Clouds.” Heck, don’t even bother reading it – just look at the pictures on the last page. They’re amazing.