I’ve wanted for a long time to describe in detail how SpaceMonger works. It’s been more than twenty years since I wrote SM 1.0, and there were a lot of innovations in SM 2.1 that I still really haven’t seen appear in any discussions elsewhere: I worked really hard to make SM fast and as smooth, even on the ridiculously limited computer hardware of the early 2000s.
Part of the work in making SM 2.1 was finding and using unusual algorithms that aren’t given much attention outside computer science literature — and part of that work was discovering and inventing new algorithms that, to the best of my knowledge, haven’t been published anywhere since. In this series of articles, I aim to fix that fact: It’s bothered me a lot that I’ve been hoarding some knowledge over the years, and it’s well past time that I share it.
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