Ron Fedkiw interview at fxguide

There's a really interesting interview with Prof. Fedkiw at fxguide.com. He describes in some detail what's going on under the hood of those cool new water animations we see in the movies. It's fun to see what all this &#!?%$# math hopefully is leading up to!

Optimizing noisy 1-D functions

Who knew such a trivial thing as finding the maximum of a noisy 1-D function would prove an unsurmountable task to modern science! While some people are fusing atoms and creating anti-matter, others are screaming in frustration over non-convergent searches and galloping derivatives when trying to focus a simple lens system in a ray tracer. Stochastic sampling in all honor, but for a tremendously costly function (e.g. ray-tracing a focus area and computing its entropy) you don't want to risk wasting those precious samples in potentially all the wrong places. Yes yes, auto-focusing a ray-tracer using the same focus measures as a normal camera might not be the smartest field to invest time in, but school assignments usually aren't picky about realism. Also, I'm sure there's plenty of other applications of a smart search algorithm for noisy data. Golden Section can't reign supreme forever! Right?