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... That's such an obvious solution![^] 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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The usual mistake:
Quote:
sentience or sentiency
1. the state or quality of being sentient; awareness
2. sense perception not involving intelligence or mental perception; feeling
I would actually demand that a robot is sentient to some degree, so that it can fulfill its task.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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It may be just me, but don't you ever get the feeling that jokes about vacuums suck?
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Infinite recursion not heard of drawing parallels? (9)
modified 27-May-21 9:01am.
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No idea, just a guess, I definitely won't be able to set the question if I win this.
That said, ITERATION?
Cheers,
Vikram.
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I hope I'm wrong as I'm not good at writing CCCs
LIMITLESS?
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The answer is rectangle.
I was hoping that the solution would be quite fiendish, however I wasn't expecting it to go unsolved.
Solution
First we need to identify the indicators:
"Infinite" means without end or endless
"Heard" means sounds like, and in this case is applied to "Not".
So we simplify our clue to:
Without end recursion knot of drawing parallels? (9)
REC = Recursion (without end/endless)
TANGLE = Knot
RECTANGLE = Drawing parallels (a rectangle can be drawn using 2 sets of parallel lines).
modified 27-May-21 10:46am.
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You have got to be shitting me. 
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Yes. There are too many ways to parse it, and there are two double indirections (infinite -> endless, which is then used as an indicator, and not heard -> knot -> tangle).
But others who are much better at these than me might disagree.
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I disagree with the indirection on the infinite one, I don't see it being any different to most indicators that are just synonyms of the action you should apply. Granted not a common indicator that you would see (if ever), but it's not a requirement to make them easy!
I was in two minds about the "knot" part though. I am not a big fan of these "double indirections" as you call them (no idea what I would call them), but it made the clue sound better in this case, and I have certainly seen others use them too so I couldn't justify them being against the rules.
A tough one for sure.
I would be interested on what people think of the "drawing parallels?" part though, does that work as a definition for "rectangle"?
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Drawing parallels suggests that the answer is a verb. Maybe two parallels would have been less cruel.
To return to my whingeing, there's the superfluous of. But it disappears if the clue becomes "Infinite recursion not hearing two parallels".
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Very nice, I like that version better.
Makes me wonder... could I use that clue tomorrow but find a different answer that fits!
(probably not)
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However you word it Greg it's still a poorly constructed clue, neither infinite or recursion indicate rectangle. End of story.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I get that you could use infinite for endless; but "endless" generally means you lose only the last letter (or at most last syllable). In this instance you've made the larger part of the word the "end". Maybe "Starting recursion" would have been more appropriate? I thought clues were "meant" to start or end with the definition; really not sure that "drawing parallels" (or even "two parallels") really defines a rectangle?
... but then I've set some questionable clues myself (it turns out - didn't realise it at the time!) and no shame in that... 
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You're absolutely right Derek it wasn't a well constructed clue as it didn't conform to any of the many unwritten rules.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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One of the unwritten laws ( there are many ) of constructing a cryptic clue, is, one of the clues words must point to the answer. in your clue they don't. Neither infinite or recursion mean rectangle. A good cryptic clue should be challenging but solvable - we can all write difficult clues but they won't conform to the cryptic rules. If one of mine isn't solved I feel that it was either poorly written or a good clue ( hopefully the latter ) but I've also been guilty of the former.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I'm wrapping up alpha channel/alpha blending support in my graphics library.
It's really cool, but it highlighted a bunch of issues with my drawing routines - particularly my ellipse and arc drawing routines.
As it happens, they are drawing in the same place more than once for part of the draw operation, leading to - say you have yellow with an alpha of 50% - well if you layer it on itself you effectively get a yellow with an alpha of 75% so that's not a happy thing to draw twice with alpha blending.
I need to retool my drawing.
However, this highlights a performance issue as well, as the less I draw, the faster things go, so this is both setback and opportunity.
I'm really proud of the alpha channel support. It was not trivial to do, since there's no hardware support for it.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: particularly my ellipse and arc drawing routines
Good old Bresenham, I assume?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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not quite. there's a variant of it that does a mirrored technique so it only computes one corner, and then it uses integers to compute successive "widths". I'm not sure what it's called. There was a description of it on tutorialspoint and I used that as a guide for implementing it.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Careful here. Exploiting symmetry is not a bad thing, but it might lead to having a SetPixel(x,y,color) method. That's a performance killer for Bresenham-type algorithms because of the address calculation that has to be done at every call. I prefer to have a memory pointer that is only incremented for horizontal steps or needs only a simple addition at every vertical step. Drawing a circle as four line segments (one for every quadrant) this way may be a lot faster than exploiting symmetry at all cost.
Maybe you should take a look at this old book from the days of Doom and Quake: Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book Special[^]
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I used to own that book.
I only use setpixel when drawing outlined ones, and line segments when drawing filled ones.
however, I have been meaning to optimize the former to use line segments like my line drawing does. horizontal and vertical line segments are fast, because you can address entire rectangles at a time and set the color. I haven't gotten around to it yet. With alpha blending it doesn't matter anyway - i have to draw pixel by pixel.
I don't gain any advantage for drawing diagonal lines using this system, because of how most of the displays work.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Nice.
It's not often that adding new features improve performance!
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