http://simonwillison.net/2025-11-09T16:51:42+00:00Simon Willison2025-11-09T16:51:42+00:002025-11-09T16:51:42+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/9/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/">Pelican on a Bike - Raytracer Edition</a></strong></p> beetle_b ran this prompt against a bunch of recent LLMs:</p> <blockquote> <p><code>Write a POV-Ray file that shows a pelican riding on a bicycle.</code></p> </blockquote> <p>This turns out to be a harder challenge than SVG, presumably because there are less examples of POV-Ray in the training data:</p> <blockquote> <p>Most produced a script that failed to parse. I would paste the error back into the chat and let it attempt a fix.</p> </blockquote> <p>The results are really fun though! A lot of them end up accompanied by a weird floating egg for some reason - <a href="https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/#claude-opus-4">here's Claude Opus 4</a>:</p> <p><img alt="3D scene. The bicycle has a sort of square frame in the wrong place, but good wheels. The pelican is stood on top - a large white blob, a smaller white blob head, a cylinder neck and a conical beak in the right place, plus legs that reach out-of-place pedals. A egg floats mysteriously in front of the bird." src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/pov-pelican-opus.png" /></p> <p>I think the best result came <a href="https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/#gpt-5">from GPT-5</a> - again with the floating egg though!</p> <p><img alt="The bike is a bit mis-shapen but has most of the right pieces. The pelican has legs that reach the pedals and is bending forward with a two-segmented neck and a good beak. A weird egg floats in the front wheel." src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/pov-pelican-gpt-5.png" /></p> <p>I decided to try this on the new <code>gpt-5-codex-mini</code>, using the <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/9/gpt-5-codex-mini/">trick I described yesterday</a>. Here's <a href="https://gist.github.com/simonw/059e0c5aee54258cdc62ed511ae26b4b">the code it wrote</a>.</p> <pre><code>./target/debug/codex prompt -m gpt-5-codex-mini \ "Write a POV-Ray file that shows a pelican riding on a bicycle." </code></pre> <p>It turns out you can render POV files on macOS like this:</p> <pre><code>brew install povray povray demo.pov # produces demo.png </code></pre> <p>The code GPT-5 Codex Mini created didn't quite work, so I round-tripped it through Sonnet 4.5 via Claude Code a couple of times - <a href="http://gistpreview.github.io/?71c4f0966d5d99003ace12197b9d07fe">transcript here</a>. Once it had fixed the errors I got this:</p> <p><img alt="Two wheels (tire only) sit overlapping half embedded in the ground. The frame is a half-buried red triangle and some other lines. There is a white pall with a tiny yellow beak and two detached cylindrical arms. It's rubbish." src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/povray-pelican-gpt-5-codex-mini.png" /></p> <p>That's significantly worse than the one beetle_b got <a href="https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/#gpt-5-mini">from GPT-5 Mini</a>! <p><small></small>Via <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45862802#45866639">BeetleB on Hacker News</a></small></p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/3d">3d</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ray-tracing">ray-tracing</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle">pelican-riding-a-bicycle</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/gpt-5">gpt-5</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/gpt">gpt</a></p>

2024-05-26T18:25:18+00:002024-05-26T18:25:18+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/26/city-in-a-bottle/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="https://frankforce.com/city-in-a-bottle-a-256-byte-raycasting-system/">City In A Bottle – A 256 Byte Raycasting System</a></strong></p> Frank Force explains his brilliant 256 byte canvas ray tracing animated cityscape demo in detail. <p><small></small>Via <a href="https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1794593416598491427">@hardmaru</a></small></p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/demoscene">demoscene</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/javascript">javascript</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ray-tracing">ray-tracing</a></p>

2008-08-29T10:24:53+00:002008-08-29T10:24:53+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2008/Aug/29/nihilogic/#atom-tag

<p><strong><a href="http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2008/07/wolfenflickr-3d-unlikely-mashup.html">WolfenFlickr 3D - An unlikely mashup</a></strong></p> Brilliant: Wolfenstein 3D style raycasting in JavaScript with images on the walls that have been pulled in using Flickr’s JSONP API. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/flickr">flickr</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/javascript">javascript</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/jsonp">jsonp</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ray-tracing">ray-tracing</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/wolfenflickr">wolfenflickr</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/wolfenstein3d">wolfenstein3d</a></p>