This was fun, I forget sometimes how silly all our grade school math worksheets used to be. I always had trouble showing my work for simple additions and multiplication, it's a bit easier when its a self motivated dunking on the GPUs.<p>It may take 4-5 days and 1000+ people, but it's definitely created a greater sense of community than any faster rendering system. I like looking over the different pixels and knowing that they represent some nerd-sniped engineer like me.
This was as much fun as it looked like. I got some nice paper, a nice pen, and made neat boxes for steps, rough columns, etc. I also converted the final RGB to hex for fun, and made a rough representation of it via colored pencil combinations. Total time was about an hour, I think, but the time wasn’t important to me. This was enjoyable.
This is a particularly fun exercise when you recall that the original "computers" were people doing arithmetic, not at all dissimilarly to what’s done here, just with less parallelism. Though they did at least have mechanical adders and multipliers!
I see a missed opportunity to remove the math and instead give people a prompt, and one pixel to shade, and then refine with each next pass.<p>Human generative reverse-diffusion AI.
> Created by Inigo Quilez<p>Of course...<p>It you are into shaders and don't know that guy, well you are one of the "lucky 10000" and you should check him out. ( <a href="https://iquilezles.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://iquilezles.org/</a> )
It feels like a missed opportunity to not show each pixel's worksheet: It would be cool if you could click on each pixel, and it opens a PDF scan of that persons calculations.
I had a lot of fun doing this, and while doing the arithmetic, figuring out what the shader algorithm is actually doing. Such a great idea, turning internet users into the world's slowest and most inaccurate GPU
I don’t know anything about shaders, so forgive the question.<p>My understanding from looking at the worksheet is the person who created the target image has created three separate formulas (depending on the area of the image), that when you feed in the X and the Y coordinates, it spits out the correct RGB value for that pixel. Is that correct? That’s wild.
What a great experiment. Math looked a bit daunting at first (pixel 22,34) glance but it really wasn't bad. Took me about 4 minutes in total to do the math.<p>Highly recommended for anyone who wants a chill afternoon challenge. And the best part is seeing the final image come together.
If you like this you will enjoy decompressing Pokémon by hand:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/aF1Yw_wu2cM" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/aF1Yw_wu2cM</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/OBVwnUH8Eek?feature=share">https://www.youtube.com/live/OBVwnUH8Eek?feature=share</a>
so someone can just write a script to generate the full image right? since instructions are the same for each pixel. Would make it easier to check your work..<p>edit: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/UO37L1b" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://imgur.com/a/UO37L1b</a>
Reminds me of the good old days when you didn't need an expensive GPU to play the latest path-traced games, just a pencil, some paper, and a few friends.
Next time something like this gets done, add a box about estimated time to compute and amount of people computing to the submission form, so that data will more closely describe the amount of work hours used.<p>Heuristically we can still get an estimate: Group names to individuals and groups. Guess average group size. Take difference between claim and submission for time it took to compute.
> <i>Claim a random pixel for yourself [...] yours, and yours only, for the next 8 hours. [...] You can claim up to 4 pixels at a time.</i><p>Why not 1 at a time, and you can claim another immediately after completing the previous?<p>And if you have 4 pixels awaiting verification, you cannot claim another pixel unless and until one of those pixels is verified?
I always wanted to see this principled, computer aided work, but for social / real world needs. A lot of friction and pain in our lives comes from the difficulty of regrouping and organizing.. when you have a framework in place to accrete everybody little efforts into a big coherent whole .. I would guess it makes everything fun and fulfilling.
Now that it's almost complete, I feel happy in releasing the solve and renderer code that many might consider a cheat.<p><a href="https://github.com/MarquisdeGeek/HumanShader">https://github.com/MarquisdeGeek/HumanShader</a>
People were too quick to claim so I wrote a hacky script to try to auto-claim in a loop and then ended up with a PNG in my terminal, beware, save the response to the request if you're going to automate the claiming part.<p>Well I got another pixel anyway.
A bit too much to ask from a user.<p>It could be split up into easier steps, like adding a pair of 4-digit numbers or multiplying a pair of 1/2 digit numbers.