alt Hacker NewsIt is probably useful to mention that many triangulation algorithms that people may think of after a couple minutes of effort without referencing existing work struggle to produce anything reasonable when given a curved object that has spiky points adjacent to curves, such as in the simple case of a cone.
Algorithms that can solve these triangulations with no additional resource usage are widespread nowadays, but they were a tough problem in the 70s and 80s.
The trick is to maximise the minimum angle inside all triangles, so that no triangle has a very small angle, in combination with carefully choosing the starting points for the triangulation.
A couple of months ago I had to write a CDL-based triangulator to solve a use case where ear-clipping doesn't support the shapes we had.
We had no AI policy at the time so I had to read up on CDL and implement it by hand. The concept is straight-forward and I also targeted regularity as acceptance criteria for the mesher, but making it optimal was hard.
I ended up having to park it after the ticket ran out of time, but now we have an AI policy this was the first problem I gave it. What it put out was similar but better structured and more informed.
I worry a little that AI will stunt our problem-solving in 20-30 years, we still need new algorithms, even when ML is capable of producing a model that can do the same thing. But right now it's much better at the things we've already done than we are.