RICHARD POWERS by Unknown Read Free Book Online

Euclid!
    What's the point of starting with equations? Vulgamott wanted to know. What do we gain?
    Kaladjian grunted. Everything starts with equations. Spiegel spoke with the distraction of the engrossed encoder. Plane curves are the fastest, easiest artifacts in the world to implement. And you can make trillions of them with just a few iterated expressions.
    Streams in the desert? Adie mocked. Orchards from out of the arid places?
    Something like that. Yes. Spiegel smiled at her, immune to her aggression. Knowing it, of old.
    She frowned at his geometric petals. But where's the leaf? I see nothing that even faintly resembles the Rousseau I showed you. At best, they look like victims of a hit-and-run Calder mobile.
    That's what you lose when you generate leaves by algorithm. Everything's a trade-off. In this case, you trade off natural complexity for something that's easier and faster ... and much too geometrical. Much too perfect.
    Too perfect! Kaladjian shouted. You cannot get too perfect. Where are the shadows and gradations? Adie sounded betrayed.
    We'd have to add them. Spiegel demonstrated. A few calls to a shading routine produced a rough, pencil-sketched idea of surface.
    Huh, Adie said, as the cardioid went crosshatched. Huh. That puts us about three baby steps toward a Miro. Wait! Go back a little bit. There. Try the feathered edges with the Bonnard orange.
    Numbers and art both fell silent at how quickly Spiegel pulled a crepe carnation out of code's silk hat.
    A pout stole over Adie's face. She extended her arm to slow things down, one palm out to break her fall.
    You're trying to tell me that ... math ... is enough to get fake leaves to look real?
    Math, Kaladjian snarled, is enough to get real leaves to look real.
    Spiegel defended her. I don't think that's what she means.
    What the hell does she mean, then? Kaladjian flicked one hand through the air, a disgusted scythe.
    Spiegel turned to Adie. Well, she? What the hell do you mean?
    God only knows. I was hoping someone here could tell me. I mean: are these equations —these cosine things—inside real plants?
    Kaladjian's Of course rammed in midair into Spiegel's Not really.
    The younger man, from the younger discipline, demurred. Well. That all depends on what you mean by "inside." Something in Spiegel's tone implied that no massively parallel array of processors short of the planet itself could hope to extract the perfect equation from out of imperfection's green.
    Let's see some veins, Karl Ebesen said. He scrutinized the test leaves from the graphic designer's eye view. How about a few burns and insect bites? The ragged scars that silk imitations never bother to imitate.
    Spiegel pressed on, coating the synthetic surface with ever-finer nubs and nuances. Boosting realism required forgoing simple polynomials and embracing a runaway explosion of polygons. Here, he told his charges, pointing at the color plate of the original jungle. Here: trying to keep his finger a safe distance from that woman's chalk-white breasts. Here, this cluster of ...
    Figs, Adie offered. Figs, I think.
    That's supposed to be a fig tree? That? OK. Let s say fig. We turn this cluster of fig leaves into a thousand little trapezoids We manufacture every one of its kinks and blips out of tiny triangles, tilted to lie in every plane that interests us.
    What they call a wire frame? Vulgamott, in his former life as an architect, had worked with endless screen-based blueprints —pale Pei imitation monoliths exploded into more tiny CAD corbels than a person could shake a French curve at.
    Wire frame. Skeleton. Whatever. Groups of graph primitives: triangles, polygons. Hidden-line removal creates the sense of three-space. Lots more verisimilitude. But tons slower. Tons harder to draw.
    Adie cleared her throat. Drawing shouldn't be a problem. I thought that's why we clueless Bohemians are on the payroll.
    Oh, not harder for you. I meant harder for the graphics boxes. For... Rembrandt and Claude