Take a peek at this curve. If you take the rounded y value for every integer x from 0 through 11, you’ll have yourself the ascii values for the string “Hello world!”.
Well, I have a computer architecture exam in six hours and can’t be bothered, so I figured I would realize a lifelong dream of mine, and make a program that prints “Hello world!” using curve fitting techniques. Enlisting the help of a good friend with numerous mathematical papers under his belt (ostensibly because he could not afford a tighter belt), MATLAB and a longing for procrastination, we embarked on this perilous journey. After many, many hours of fitting and discarding data, I can finally present to you my masterpiece.
It’s 12 characters summed from 10 sines and cosines:
96.75 - 21.98*cos(x*1.118) + 13.29*sin(x*1.118) - 8.387*cos(2*x*1.118) + 17.94*sin(2*x*1.118) + 1.265*cos(3*x*1.118) + 16.58*sin(3*x*1.118) + 3.988*cos(4*x*1.118) + 8.463*sin(4*x*1.118) + 0.3583*cos(5*x*1.118) + 5.878*sin(5*x*1.118)
Poromenos’ blog has the full Python script which evaluates and renders the famous words. Hands down, this is the best math to happen to me all day.
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