News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Geometric Algebra (2012) by Gene_Parmesan on Sunday November 29, 2020 @08:04PM (#25249724)
I share your pain, as someone who messes around with game engine dev as a hobby and has also read through that book. He sure made geometric algebra sound like it _should_ be useful, but man is it clear as mud to me.

Of course in general I'm not surprised; for instance I'm not surprised that this paper doesn't have many practical examples. It's higher level math, of course, and for people in that space, showing a small example where you use the geometric product to solve an abstract linear algebra problem is about as close to 'practical' as you are going to get.

But I found it much more aggravating in that book. It's specifically a practical book after all, meant to help lay foundations for renderer and physics engine dev -- but as you said, that section is completely devoid of any real examples of how you could integrate it to make Problem A or B easier, or how it simplifies your transform code, or literally anything. The complete lack of code examples or any such real-world applications make the chapter feel a bit out of place, maybe even tacked on or gratuitous. (Which is a shame because he kind of builds up to that chapter, dropping hints here and there about how it will fundamentally shift our understanding.)

There are no comments on this comment yet.