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mxplerin commented on An Algorithm for a Better Bookshelf   cacm.acm.org/news/an-algo... · Posted by u/pseudolus
troelsSteegin · 6 months ago
Are "adversaries" broadly used in algorithm design? I've not seen that before. I'm used to edge cases and trying to break things, but an "adversary", especially white box, seems different.
mxplerin · 6 months ago
Yes. There is a whole sector of algorithm design called online algorithms dedicated to studying algorithms that must make decisions without complete information. A common analysis technique proves the "competitive ratio" of an algorithm by analyzing its worst case performance against an adversary. In fact, this article was the analysis of one particular online problem. For a simple introduction, you can check out "the ski rental problem." More complex applications include things like task scheduling and gradient descent.

Adjacent to this topic is algorithms for two-player games, like minimax, which depend on imagining an adversary that plays perfect counter moves.

In a similar vein, in ML, there is a model called generative adversarial networks (GANs) in which 2 networks (a generator and discriminator) play a minimax game against each other, improving the capability of both models at once.

mxplerin commented on Rendering Crispy Text on the GPU   osor.io/text... · Posted by u/ibobev
bschwindHN · 6 months ago
I did something similar with cosmic-text and glium, but it would be fun to have a vector rendering mode to do fancier stuff with glyph outlines and transforms for games and 3D stuff. And open source, of course.

I suppose vello is heading there but whenever I tried it the examples always broke in some way.

mxplerin · 6 months ago
I have an abandoned proof-of-concept of something similar that might be worth checking out https://github.com/mxple/fim

u/mxplerin

KarmaCake day3June 13, 2025View Original