Unsung Science: The Man Who Invented QR Codes
In 1994, Masahiro Hara got tired of having to scan six or seven barcodes on every box of Toyota car-parts that zoomed past him on the assembly line. He wondered why the standard barcode from the 70s was still used...Why couldn’t someone invent a barcode that used two dimensions instead of one that could work from any angle or distance, even even if it got smudged or torn?
And so, studying a game of "Go", he dreamed up what we now know as the QR Code — the square barcode you scan with your phone. It shows up on restaurant menus, billboards, magazine ads — even tattoos and gravestones. But even that, says Hara-san, is only the beginning.
Listen here: chrt.fm/track/22GG1/dts.podtra…
Podcast webpage: art19.com/shows/unsung-science
Rokosun
in reply to Rokosun • • •Rokosun
in reply to Rokosun • • •Update: I've made the code a lot more faster by following a tip by @sotolf. Basically now the program is doing a reverse brute-force by starting at the end point and working its way upwards. So now the code finishes running in about 2 minutes, but if you use the --opt:speed compiler flag in #Nim then it can finish in 20 seconds! For comparison, my previous code took 12 minutes to finish even with the compiler flag on!
Here's the Nim code - codeberg.org/rokosun/AOC/src/b…
AOC
Codeberg.org