Bugs
Original Source ↗People often notice such falsities in Dreaming as a sudden change in landscape. For example, I walk along a park alley, and suddenly the flat surface turns into a hillside. The steepness increases, and I can barely clamber up a sheer wall... One day I was sitting and pondering this. And then, bingo! This is just a copy of the polygonal texturing problem. In three-dimensional graphics, two methods are used to create artificial worlds: voxel and polygonal. They differ in their object construction methods. Voxel graphics use a voxel (Volume Pixel) – a volumetric point, or rather, an ordinary colored cube – as the basic building unit. Objects are built from voxels like Lego bricks. The method's weakness lies in scaling. When zoomed in (approximated), the image turns into a pile of squares. In polygonal graphics, the polygon is the basis of everything – a multi-sided figure in space. Creating an artificial world requires a huge number of polygons. And this method also has its drawbacks.
How does texture mapping occur? Suppose we need to build a brick wall in a virtual space. We draw a flat image with bricks in a graphic editor and "stretch" it onto a flat quadrangular polygon. It's like gluing colored wallpaper onto a white wall. But this is theory; in practice, the texture is stored in the video card's memory. When forming an image, a color corresponding to a specific texture point in memory (texel) is chosen for each screen pixel. In computer graphics, there are several texturing methods, but in Dreaming, this process often yields distortions characteristic of linear sampling – the fastest, but also the most primitive method. Thus, it can be assumed that the strange transformation of the landscape in Dreaming is not some special quality of dreams, but a "program bug" (a programmer's oversight).
Another oversight by the "programmers" of Dreaming is evident in the lighting of polygons (or "Perception Bubbles"). This is either the simplest flat shading, where the polygon receives only one degree of brightness, or an analogue of Gouraud shading, where the vertices of the polygons are illuminated. In such cases, we usually have a darkened center and brightly lit corners. Pre-syncopal states of consciousness are an example of the second type.
Furthermore, Dreaming has poor "anti-aliasing." If you try to draw a circle on the ground in a dream, you will understand what I mean (and the larger the diameter of the circle, the more the bug will be perceived). It seems to me that Don Juan knew about this feature of Dreaming and made C.C. draw circles around his hut so that Carlos would grasp the limitations of the world-description.
I propose a topic: finding "bugs" in the world of everyday reality.