pouët.net

Hio, so I've put together this thing called Human Shader, a project where anybody can participate and help create the first ever human-brain-only powered shader!

https://humanshader.com

All you need to know is how to add, subtract and multiply (thanks to old-school fixed point magic), so anybody can really help. And we can use some help!

In times of machines pretend to do human things, let's pretend we are the machine for a bit, see how bad we are at it ^__^

(for full disclosure, I'll probably use the experiment for some talk or youtube video; saying in case that puts you off)

I really hope that the results will not be checked against a machine-computed ground truth and the unavoidable human mistakes will instead just end up in the picture as noise.

No machine is involved in the process, just humans and their charming faulty logic. Errors are part of the experiment and will stay.

But something humans often to do is setting common goals and collaborating towards them, so maybe it can be interesting to let the participants recompute pixels that they deem incorrect (redu dancy voting). There's no reason to limit the experiment to first-shot effort, nothing we do is first-shot. In the end all will depend on the momentum and if there's enough activity to supoort some amount of redundancy.

IMHO, this would make more sense as a collaborative image drawing project, where every participant is allowed to set the color of one pixel to an RGB value of their choice. It would be an interesting experiment to see what this would result in.

@Adok, it was done on reddit a while ago. Search for /r/place
It was an amazing experiment.

looks like a selfie of a guy on a beach

it's so very Dune-esque, the idea that we replace machines with humans.

very convoluted way to get me to do my maths homework, sir :P

what is amazing is that a (clearly complex) final image can be created by a simple algorithm that doesnt use sin/cos

the image being

On the other hand, don't you only ever need sin/cos if you want to rotate something?

i still remember trying to "beat" aliasing artifacts on the c64 over a simple sine graph by going veeery slowly on the pokes (going slow in t, in theory would draw "half" pixels)

"On the other hand, don't you only ever need sin/cos if you want to rotate something?"

But what about sinus scrollers?

thanks, that was fun

I had simple case, so calculated everything in memory, but put it down later for easier verification ;P

Also it would be funny if the outcome is a picture of the "centipede" (I know, I know, lame joke).

@guille: Thanks for the hint! It's interesting that this experiment has already been conducted and the results look very nice.

As for the /r/place comment, another one has been started.

I think this was super cool to see play out and the result is just perfect. Excellent idea & execution iq!

IQ, I got you. The hidden purpose of human shader was to put principles of shader on paper in multiple locations on earth, so when all computers went broken, humanity can restore the knowledge about shaders.

Thanks skrebbel, I'm also very please with the result and how the experiment went. There was very few attempts to hack or game the system, but most of the work was honest. Got feedback from lots of people including teenagers that enjoyed the experiment and want more.

On looking to all the sheets of calculations I can see patterns in the mistakes people made. Interestingly, most errors are not in the computations but in the bookkeeping of the computations (such as copying the wrong variable to the next step or to the submission form) or due to miscommunication on my side (like not explaining clearly what the | shift operators does). So basically, with a little bit more care on my side and by encouraging a more systematic work plan, the error rate could have been much lower.

But this is probably the main learning of the experiment, humans are messy. Somebody said "meat GPU driver is buggy"; and indeed it is, but maybe this is a true case where the bug is not a bug but a feature.

iq: ha, I'm glad you enjoy math teacher job ;) I was actually once kind of forced to do it to prepare lectures/check students exams while working as a researcher. I remember one incident when one student (sic!) made simple algebraic mistake, something like he evaluated 2*(x+y) as 2*x+y instead of 2*x+2*y and exact same mistake with exact same derivation appeared on three more students exams sitting next to him!

Anyways, the problem is most people don't care about verification step - something they actually teach in primary school. If you don't double (or triple) check every single step, the error just accumulates, and it's fairly easy to make small mistakes here and there.