Better Know Your Metroids
- Metroid. Introduced in 1986 by Gunpei Yokoi and Satoru Okada. Name is a portmanteau of metro and android (android is a combination of andr-, man, and -oid, likeness). Metroids are fictional jellyfish-like creatures with quadripartite nuclei. They are chased by the bounty hunter Samus. Killing them can be done with the help of the ice beam.
A metroid in space. Source: Super Metroid instruction manual, Nintendo, page 35.
- Metroid. Introduced in 1986 by A. Dress and T. F. Havel. Name is a portmanteau of matroid and metric (matroid is a combination of matrix and -oid, likeness). Metroids are a subclass of all polyhedra defined by constraints with {0, +1, -1} coefficients. They are totally dual integral. Optimizing linear functions over them can be done with the help of a greedy algorithm.
A metroid in the plane. Source: Submodular Functions and Optimization, Satoru Fujishige, 2nd ed, page 107.
Cool! In computer graphics, sometimes you use beveled bounding boxes (a form of k-DOP, or discrete oriented polyhedron) for your spatial sorting needs. {0, +1, -1} makes the computations cheap, since aribtrary-plane/metroid intersection dot-products become multiplication-free. Now I can call them something cool!
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I’m tired of these m**f**n metroids on this m**f**n plane!
Lol. Hypersnakes on a hyperplane?
Haha, awesome!