How Much of a Genius-Level Move Was Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom? | Hacker News Reader

How Much of a Genius-Level Move Was Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom?

twobithistory.org

21 pointsjanvdberg6 comments

While I am sure Carmack is a great programmer, this constant hacker hero worship is grating. The post is fawning over Carmack for using BSP trees but barely gives enough credit to the inventor of BSP. The same thing happened where Carmack was credited with inventing the sqrt fn, until it turned out that he did not.

We could use less hero worship on hn.

Did you read the article?

> Carmack was not the first person to think of using BSP trees in a real-time graphics simulation. Of course, it’s one thing to anticipate that BSP trees might be used this way and another thing to actually do it. But even in the implementation Carmack may have had more guidance than is commonly assumed.

I did and this article is somewhat balanced. However, one can ask - Why didn't the author try to figure out how the original research was done instead of putting in so much effort in to figuring out how Carmack used the research. Why ask the question, how impressive is Carmack for using cutting edge research in a game - Einstein VS Simpson scale, instead of asking a similar question about the inventors of the data structure.

From the pov of computer history, is it more important to document Carmacks use of an algorithm or the invention of the algorithm itself? Would this article have made it to the front page if Carmacks name wasn't attached?

BSP trees in a real-time graphics simulation was pretty popular in VR walkthrough and visualization apps before the Doom/Quake era. E.g. in our university we used BSP trees in the Amadeus VR plugin (called 3D scene viewer), which was the Windows browser for Hyper-G/HyperWave. The pre-Netscape web browser/editor. https://much.isds.tugraz.at/projects/amadeus/13.htm/

I dunno, it's a pretty cool idea, the author of the article mentioned Carmack didn't think it up alone, and what hero worship there is was more used as a jumping off point to discuss the problem and algorithm/solution.

Important to note that he never claimed to have invented either.

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