The World is beautiful
Sun, 16 May 2010
Well, in January and February last year, I was messing around with some assembly programming, reading books I found online. They talked about memory, and the CPU and other lower level concepts than I usually deal with while working on computer games (graphics, logic, and AI and stuff for example). I wrote some ASM and used nasm to assemble it, linked it and ran it. It felt awesome. :-) I could actually look at the intermediate or linked file produced, and see the codes and see what they correspond to in the program. Each instruction was sent to the CPU. From then on, it’s well, electrical ‘magic’ (yeah ok, ‘microcodes’, CPU-dependent, point taken, but still). That’s it. The end of the software (my definition of it) world. The ‘wall’.
Then, around 2 months ago this year, I began to read about electricity and magnetism, as a ‘physics topic’. Coulomb’s law, Gauss’ law, and stuff, through magnetism, and all the way to Maxwell’s Equations and the solution to an electromagnetic wave equation that satisfies them. I decided, it’s time to move forward a little more. How does this make circuitry work? Maybe I can hit the previous ‘wall’ from the other side? We also did some Boolean Algebra in class, and learnt about minimising expressions and converting them into circuits. Made me more curious. There are still some ‘gaps’ I need to ‘fill’. So, I decided to go ahead and start with this. Just blew my mind. The exact same thing I was thinking – Maxwell’s Equations, then move ‘upward’ a little bit – I might just be able to hit it. If I do, I’ll tell you about it. :-)
Beatiful though. How GraLL, rolling around on my screen, inverting gravity, jumping dimensions, is but a product of what I imagine this machine is trying to tell me. This machine, which runs on what? Charges that attract/repel each other due to electrical/magnetic interactions. The fun part is, the machine doesn’t ‘understand’ what it’s doing. It just follows a bunch of rules. But it works. A new world is created. It’s even more fun when I realise that my work has had some influence on how this world behaves. Very abstract, cold, seemingly lifeless rules somehow bring a world alive and moving.
Absolutely astounding.
