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eholk / harlan

A language for GPU computing.
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Implement a run-length encoding test #84

Open eholk opened 11 years ago

eholk commented 11 years ago

This is different from run length encoding as a compression format, at least in my mind. This is for rendering information visualizations. As I understand it, the idea is you have lots of geometry things that might map to the same pixel. You want to aggregate how many of each kind of geometry land on the same pixel. If we ignore the order, we're just creating a histogram, but for some visualizations, order matters too.

@JosephCottam, did I get the details basically right?

JosephCottam commented 11 years ago

Basic details are right, and reflect our conversation in late-April/early May.

FYI: Since our conversations have occurred, the perceived need for ordering has significantly reduced. Therefore, count-of-categories (CoC) has become more prominent than run-length-encode (RLE) in more recent applications.