Clever and I like it. I will use it when it is delivered.
At 05:40 PM 2/11/01 -0800, Stephan T. Lavavej wrote:
>With respect to the screensaver idea,
>The difficult thing about visualizing the Lucas-Lehmer compuation is that
>it's so... abstract. There isn't any immediately obvious way to see its
>progress other than what's currently done: a readout of the iteration number
>and clock cycle. However, another idea did spring into my mind. Everyone
>here is familiar with The Matrix, and the screens of green scrolling numbers
>and letters displayed at various points in the movie. I suggest that the
>screensaver might display the intermediate residues in hexadecimal in such a
>fashion, dropping the residues hexit-by-hexit on the screen such that one
>residue's worth of digits is displayed every iteration. This way, it's just
>not a green blurry readout of a list of residues, but a staggered waterfall
>of hexits. I think it would look nifty. Faster computers would have a
>faster flowing waterfall of hexits, and it would also depend on the size of
>the number being tested. It's simple, and it immediately shows the
>"fastness" of the computation and its intermediate results in a way that
>humans could see. People would probably want to be able to configure the
>colors of the hexits displayed, I'm sure.
>
>-*---*-------
>Stephan T. Lavavej
>
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