alt Hacker NewsThanks! I'm pretty sure with this one I spent more time working on the blog post than I did developing the algorithms.
I would not normally spend such effort, but in this case I felt that the functions were too hard to understand without the visual aid, and too difficult to customise without the Function Explorer.
Then I think I just got a bit carried away with the detail.
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The theory is trivial for anyone with a Number Theory background. That's not the point. Picking a good and interesting problem and going all the way to an elegant optimal solution, AND presenting it well, is all that counts. Without the good presentation and proof, it could look like a hack / weird trick to a random reviewer. I have personally seen a few good algorithms of this sort being dismissed in codebases because they were hard for people to understand (or more precisely, the author hadn't been skilled / diligent enough to leave a good demonstration linked in the code).
I wish there was a place for good algorithms like this, where, unlike plain wikipedia, the good visualized proof could stay and serve. Or perhaps there are such places and I don't know about them.
Bret Victor did a bunch of work around visualizations ~12 years ago (IIRC) for teaching and showing math, but I am not sure if there was any following on that path.
Thanks for putting in the effort.
You might also https://www.redblobgames.com/ and learn a lot from how they do their presentations.