Re:Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007)
by mistersquid on Saturday February 15, 2020 @09:33PM
(#22339475)
I have my own fond memories of After Dark, especially the Satori module. The colored whorls Satori produced were so aesthetically pleasing, and I do think part of its durability would be the “organic” quality of the render, a quality probably partly due to the excellence of After Dark’s randomization.
Jack Eastman attributes quite a bit of After Dark’s success among the competition due to the team’s striving for high quality randomness:
> The other thing we were careful to do was not to put the toasters on a track and repeat the show. Random numbers were always important from that point on. I had done Monte Carlo simulations in my physics work and knew how to produce random numbers in various distributions. I think that was an important idea – we had these little movies, but you couldn’t predict them.
> Competitors didn’t have that insight. With After Dark you could just zone out and watch for a long time. Plus it was really a screen saver – it wouldn’t do to have images sitting in one place or in repeating patterns. [0]
Jack Eastman attributes quite a bit of After Dark’s success among the competition due to the team’s striving for high quality randomness:
> The other thing we were careful to do was not to put the toasters on a track and repeat the show. Random numbers were always important from that point on. I had done Monte Carlo simulations in my physics work and knew how to produce random numbers in various distributions. I think that was an important idea – we had these little movies, but you couldn’t predict them.
> Competitors didn’t have that insight. With After Dark you could just zone out and watch for a long time. Plus it was really a screen saver – it wouldn’t do to have images sitting in one place or in repeating patterns. [0]
[0] https://lowendmac.com/2007/aggressively-stupid-the-story-beh...