Drawing “circles” ala Marvin Minsky…
In my re-reading of Levy’s book Hackers, I was reminded of an interesting bit of programming lore regarding an early display hack that Marvin Minsky did for circle drawing. It’s an interesting hack because the lore was that it was originally coded by mistake, and yet the result proved to be both interesting and even useful. I first learned of this years ago when Blinn did an article on different ways to draw a circle, but also learned that it was part of the MIT AI memo called “HAKMEM”. Here’s the basic idea:
One way that you can draw a circle is to take some point x, y on the circle, and then generate new points by rotating them around the center (let’s say that’s the origin for ease) and connecting them with lines. If you have a basic understanding of matrix math, it looks like this:
/ x' \ / cos theta sin theta \ / x \ | | = | | | | \ y' / \ - sin theta cos theta / \ y /
(I should learn how to use MathML, but you hopefully get the idea). The matrix with the cosine and sine terms in it is a rotation matrix which rotates a point around by the angle theta. Apparently Minsky tried to simplify this by noting that cos(theta) is very nearly one for small theta, and that sin(theta) can be approximated by theta (we can get this by truncating the Taylor series for both). Therefore, he thought that (I’m guessing here, but it seems logical) that we could simplify this as:
/ x' \ / 1 eps \ / x \ | | = | | | | \ y' / \ -eps 1 / \ y /
Okay, it’s pretty obvious that this seems like a bad idea. For one thing, the “rotation” matrix isn’t a pure rotation. It’s determinant is 1 – eps^2 1 + eps^2, which means that points which are mapped move slowly toward away from the origin. Nevertheless, Minsky apparently thought that it might be interesting, so he went ahead an implemented the program. I’ll express it here is pseudo-code:
newx = oldx - eps * oldy newy = oldy + eps * newx
Note: this program is “buggy”. The second line should (for some definition of should) read “oldy + eps * oldx“, but Minsky got it wrong. Interestingly though, this “bug” has an interesting side effect: it draws circles! If eps is a power of 2, you can even implement the entire thing in integer arithmetic, and you don’t need square roots or floating point or anything. Here’s an example of it drawing a circle of radius 1024:
Well, there is a catch: it doesn’t really draw circles. It draws ellipses. But it’s still a very interesting bit of code. The first thing to note is that if you actually write down the transformation matrix that the “wrong” equations implement, the determinant is one. That helps explain why the point doesn’t spiral in. But there is another odd thing: if you implement this in integer based arithmetic, it’s eventually periodic (it doesn’t go out of control, all the round off errors eventually cancel out, and you return to the same point again and again and again). In HAKMEM, Schroeppel proclaims that the reason for the algorithm’s stability was unclear. He notes that there are a finite number of distinct radii, which indicates that perhaps the iterative process will always eventually fill in the “band” of valid radii, but the details of that seem unclear to me as well. I’ll have to ponder it some more.
Addendum: The real reason I was looking at this was because the chapter in Hackers which talks about Spacewar! also talks about the Minskytron whose official name was TRI-POS. It apparently uses some of this idea to draw curves in an interesting way. HAKMEM item #153 also suggests an interesting display hack:
ITEM 153 (Minsky):
To portray a 3-dimensional solid on a 2-dimensional display, we can use a single circle algorithm to compute orbits for the corners to follow. The (positive or negative) radius of each orbit is determined by the distance (forward or backward) from some origin to that corner. The solid will appear to wobble rigidly about the origin, instead of simply rotating.
Might be interesting to implement.
Addendum2: I goofed up the determinant above, it should be 1 + eps^2, not 1-eps^2. Corrected.