Live data from Hacker News

Playing with Wolfram Playing Cards

adereth.github.io

11–20 of 40 posts

Re: Playing with Wolfram Playing Cards

#11

How plausible are animated versions of these in real life? What's the thinnest we can make a display+processor combo that can be powered by, say, the heat from my hands?

I don't think you could practically power a display + processor combo with the heat from your hands. The best I can find on the power radiated by your hands is this article

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-flashlight-is...

That article says you can get about 5 milliwatts using a Peltier converter, so working backwards based on Peltier converters being ~10% efficient that's only 50 milliwatts radiated by your hands. Even with an ideal 100% efficient converter that turns 100% of that energy into electricity, combined with a 100% efficient step up converter to raise the voltage that's not a lot to work with, that's barely enough power to light a couple of blue LEDs, much less a display and a microcontroller capable of rendering 3D graphics.

Re: Playing with Wolfram Playing Cards

#13
They should provide a QR code on each card that sends you to the Wolfram site with the expression being executed, that way when you are waiting your turn on Hold-em you can watch the animation from your phone

(it must have been a pain to hand type those expressions...great job!)

Re: Playing with Wolfram Playing Cards

#17

Indeed, of all the tech company swag I've seen and collected, from a pure nerdiness metric, I'd wager Wolfram's remains one of the coolest by far.

A CAS with beautiful graphing is a big feature that is required in most situations and their swag wants to sell that point .

Re: Playing with Wolfram Playing Cards

#18
post #10

I'm always amazed by how expressive Mathematica is. Writing some of these expressions imperatively would be significantly more than one line.

These are mostly just API calls with arguments, with some simple lambdas. You can implement that in any language.

I think the magic of Mathematica is the combination of (1) a huge collection of well-maintained CAS and math functions (2) great graphics and animation support (3) the notebook interface (which jupyter is catching up on fast) and (4) some of the best documentation in the industry.

Modifying the Mathematica code after its written, however, is very tricky.

Re: Playing with Wolfram Playing Cards

#20
post #10

I'm always amazed by how expressive Mathematica is. Writing some of these expressions imperatively would be significantly more than one line.

I’ve been toying with an idea for a while. Mathematica/Wolfram is a surprisingly interesting language from a design p.o.v. — everything from the Lisp origins, syntax sugar, syntax highlighting and formatting, all the things mentioned in another comment etc.

I’ve been thinking about writing about some of these details and how other languages and editors could be inspired.

Anybody who thinks there might be interest?

Post reply on HN