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Human Shader

humanshader.com

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Re: Human Shader

#81

Post by dspillett »

cvoss wrote: post #20
jabbany wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really interesting seeing the (what I assume are) error pixels.

The author should implement an error correction system, where 1) the result is withheld from the display until a second corroborating calculation comes in, and 2) if there is disagreement, request an arbitration from a third user whose job is to pick which of the two is the best answer.

Or a story if anti-aliasing but getting each pixel computed multiple times and averaging the results. Over time the image should get better as the errors are diluted. It will significantly increase the amount of HPU time required, but with enough human processing units willingly taking part the wall-clock time might not be too badly affected.

Re: Human Shader

#83

Post by dumdumchan »

Sharlin wrote: post #41

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!

Los alamos used a room full of women for doing simulations when their IBM machine was out of order:

We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and everything. And the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but he was always delayed.

Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical steps that the machines were supposed to do — multiply this, and then do this, and subtract that. Then we worked out the program, but we didn’t have any machine to test it on. So we set up this room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant: one was the multiplier, another was the adder. This one cubed — all she did was cube a number on an index card and send it to the next girl.

We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. It turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot faster than the other way, where every single person did all the steps. We got speed with this system that was the predicted speed for the IBM machine. The only difference is that the IBM machines didn’t get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.

Re: Human Shader

#84

Post by jffry »

sb057 wrote: post #60
LectronPusher wrote: post #14

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. 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 th…

I think something like this would actually make for a really interesting 3rd grade class project, with each student contributing a few pixels.

It's slightly older than 3rd grade, but for Pi Day 2022, Matt Parker marshaled a couple dozen students to spend a weekend computing pi by hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtiLxLrzjOQ

Re: Human Shader

#85

Post by phist_mcgee »

boondoggle16 wrote: post #79
ninju wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as depicted by the cool movie Hidden Figures ".. Based on the unbelievably true life stories of three of these women, known as "human computers", we follow these women as they quickly rose the ranks of NASA..." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340/

Quote from imdb movie description: > mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history In this case, aren't they more like hands than brains? The brains should be the ones who created the code. These people are just processing it, it's like manual labor.

An unkind assessment.

They used their brains to perform the calculations, I don't see how you could see it otherwise.

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