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Show HN: Geomatic – A command-driven geometry studio enabled with autodiff (tinyvolt.com)

75 points by nivter ↗ HN
All commands have the format `output = \func inputs` or just `\function inputs`. Points and scalars are built on the fly. Eg `\line a b` to an empty canvas creates points `a` and `b`, and joins them with a line.

One can use broadcasting semantics similar to NumPy and PyTorch in a visual setting (imagine creating a list of circles where one dim corresponds to radius and another to the center). One can also use backpropagation, run gradient descent or visualize vector fields. Almost everything is reactive so changing a variable updates all of the downstream geometry. It also allows anyone to write and load their own visualization, which can be broadcasted and differentiated through.

https://www.tinyvolt.com/geomatic/examples/getting-started

14 comments

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ddxv
What is autodiff?
dmos62
Pretty cool. Curious, why a one time payment? Why not, say, a smaller monthly payment?
roger_
Cool idea but not very mobile friendly it seems.
herpdyderp
- When I have an example open, I can't type any commands.

- When I open an example, I expected to actually... see an example. I'm not gonna read the wall of text. I don't even understand what this is yet, that's why I tried to see an example.

necovek
The example was great for someone like me: I'd rather read through and follow excellent instructions by clicking through commands to understand the value of this command-driven tool.

If you want to look through a video or something, then this tool is likely not for you! (nothing bad with that, that's why it's great that there are so many different tools we can choose from)

permute
It’s fun to play around with this! It could be helpful to add support for parentheses and chaining of commands. For example: \add (\area-circle circ0) (\area-circle circ1). Intermediate nodes could be anonymous or automatically named.