Comment by quotemstr

> nomograms

Me too!

Nomograms are cool. They're little charts that let you compute a function physically, e.g. by lining up a ruler. A nomogram isn't a picture of a function: it is the function. If you're clever, you can make a nomogram that encodes complicated nonlinear mappings or even complex-valued relationships on a 2D plane.

Occasionally nomograms are just better too: because they're continuous and analog, they can naturally express things digital logic people can do only awkwardly, just like Rust people can only awkward approximate things natural in Verilog (e.g. truly parallel CAM search).

Nomograms are basically the tabletop gaming of math. Like a good tabletop game, a good nomogram requires a special kind of cleverness. Sure, coding something like Factorio is also hard: but it runs on a CPU. Something as rich and complex as Power Grid and High Frontier? Running on cardboard? Whole other level.

I recall one tabletop two-player game that featured a single-player mode in which you played against an "AI" that you ran by hand by moving cardboard pieces around on a game-provided template under pseudocode-ish rules from the game manual. It's hard enough to code a decent game AI with all the resources of a CPU at your disposal. It's an OOM harder to do it when you're limited to physically-realized lookup tables, a literal handful of registers, and a scant few clock cycles of logic per turn.

Coming full circle, some of these tabletop game "AI"s incorporate nomograms to help them fit their logic within the constraints.

Example of a cool nomogram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_chart. Smith charts let you compute complex (pun intended) relationships in RF signal processing with just a compass and straightedge.

Also: part of the fun in making nomograms is that there's no general procedure you can follow to make a good one, just like there's no general compiler from computer game to tabletop game. They're art: specifically, one of those forms of art that, like architecture, has to meet functional requirements while tickling our aesthetic sense. It's kind of funny how when you optimize this kind of art for aesthetics under their functional constraints, you end up supercharging the functional part by side effect somehow.