New comment by fedorsapronov in "How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU"

fedorsapronov — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:06:38 +0000

Fascinating how constraint breeds elegance. 25 MHz forces you to find O(1) or O(log n) solutions where modern devs would reach for O(n²) and more hardware.

Same principle applies to on-chain computation: gas costs force you to find closed-form solutions. For example, computing φⁿ (golden ratio to the power n) naively requires n multiplications. Using the matrix identity [[1,1],[1,0]]^n via repeated squaring gives you O(log n) — and the Fibonacci numbers fall out for free. The old game devs would have appreciated EVM constraints.

New comment by fedorsapronov in "Six (and a half) intuitions for KL divergence"

fedorsapronov — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:04:53 +0000

Nice writeup. One thing I've been exploring is how information-theoretic measures connect to physics — specifically, the KL divergence between a "true" vacuum distribution and a perturbed one gives you coupling constants. In the Fibonacci- structured potential V(s) = v⁴(s−s₀)²/(1−s−s²), the strong coupling αₛ = 1/(2φ³) emerges exactly as the curvature at the vacuum divided by 2. The information- geometric interpretation is that αₛ measures how "distinguishable" the vacuum is from the pole — a Fisher metric on the space of potentials.

Probably a stretch, but it's interesting how divergence measures keep showing up in unexpected places.

Hacker News: fedorsapronov

New comment by fedorsapronov in "How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU"

New comment by fedorsapronov in "Six (and a half) intuitions for KL divergence"