>>5479260>"Manchester Baby" computervery interesting anon, I did not know about this machine!
I mentioned on a past qtg thread that the preferred calculating engine of the vampire sorceror is of course the Philips Machine / hydraulic computer,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIACwhich I saw demonstrated once at university, it is really too cringe to mention though but they are still proud of its plumbing and history for some embarrassing reason. But I basically elaborated on that cringe fluid computer idea to create my cyberpunk game setting of the Lightning Sea, an oracle ocean supercomputer.
Despite my c++ vector container babble lol I am not actually that knowledgeable about computers or programming, though I remember being caught out and infuriated by those out of bounds array warnings many many times hehe.
I think I may have seen some demoscene people use that -1 index hack deliberately (maybe need to be operating on the bitwise level) to flip and retrieve max-1 array element when writing very constrained or probably unsafe code. A bit like how Carmack does the bitshift to divide by 2 in his fast inverse square root used in Quake 3 yay
In my games I featured a story item named the Linearithmic Abacus, this one:
https://www.archived.moe/qst/thread/5054156/#5058516It is based on that Big O notation
O ( log n!) =O (n log n)
time computation thing
https://medium.com/swlh/big-o-notation-and-time-space-complexity-1806936e6330or just the table here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity#Quasilinear_timeI only vaguely understand this, but I know not to nest too many for loops hehe. n log n comes up a lot in mathematics, Shannon information entropy is also log likelihood weighted by likelihood of occurrence, p log p etc. and I remember Stirling's Formula has it (used to approximate factorials, Gamma Function etc) which is how you can get that interesting result
0.5! = 0.5 * (pi) ^ 0.5
