Blogs / Personal blogs

Jason Fantl

jasonfantl.com

A blog where I write about my computer science projects, usually with some animations, code, and/or simulations.

Popular posts
4
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986
HN comments
400
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#2,224 personal

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1

Cosmologically Unique IDs

We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be…

2

What Is Entropy?

People say many things about entropy: entropy increases with time, entropy is disorder, entropy increases with energy, entropy determines the arrow of time, etc.. But I have no idea what entropy is, and from what I find, neither do most other people. This is the introduction I wish I had when first told about entropy…

3

Rediscovering Quaternions

How do we represent a rotation in 3 dimensions? This is a surprisingly deep question, and one we can learn a lot from. Our goal will be to “rediscover” quaternions from first principles, building them up by exploring different representations and fixing the failures along the way.

4

Simulated Economy Tutorial

Concept Motivation Imagine an open world RPG where your actions affect the price of goods, the markets reacting to anything the player may do (burn down wheat fields, cost of food increases; kill the merchants, prices differentiate between cities; sell the many swords you’ve collected on your adventures, tank the…