R.I.P. John W. Backus

John W. Backus, the man behind Fortran, has passed away at an age of 82. It's hard to assess what an impact Backus, mainly through the conception of Fortran, has had on the development of computer science in general and scientific computing in particular, but he definitely ranks among the big ones. Read the NY Times article.

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?