Gigapixel Tapestries & Gigadecimal Pi 215
RobotWisdom writes "The new New Yorker magazine has posted two long non-technical articles about the Chudnovsky brothers and their homebrew supercomputers. One is a 1992 article about how they calculated pi to over two billion decimal places using a $70,000 cluster with 16 nodes. The other is a brandnew piece about how they spent months creating a seamless multi-gigabyte image of a fifteenth century tapestry for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tapestries are essentially pixel-art on a non-rigid (cloth) matrix, so the manual labor of photographing it inch by inch had introduced many tiny deformations in the images, which they had to mathematically iron out. Old lo-res pix of the tapestries are on the Met's site, pix of the brothers are in the world brain."
Re:Looks fine to me... (Score:2, Insightful)
This has got to be one of the most short sighted posting on
Re:several months?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with your analogy. Aerial mosaics have nothing to do with the work that the brothers had to accomplish.
For instance, in aerial photagraphy the landscape being photagraphed changes very little if it changes at all (most of the changes are not even perceptible at the resolution of the cameras). Therefore reconstructing the full image is pretty much trivial (finding the overlapping sections is straightforward).
In this case, and from TA, the images changed from frame to frame! because of several factors, temperature, humidity, light conditions etc. Also the paper cover that the photographers used also disturbed the fine threading in the images. So determining the overlapping sections between tiles could not be easyly automated, in fact from the article it seems that they were not even discernible with the naked eye.
I thing that the time spent in that project was actually productive, and that in the process a bunch of original algorithms were created (I hope they are published in some place).
Re:Pi Accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Pi is 4 x (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 + 1/11
wow... waste of processor cycles! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Film (Score:2, Insightful)