User:DroneBetter
I mainly make minor corrections here, but also occasionally peruse Catagolue and add information here about things I find there (which is easy because quite a lot seems to be overlooked).
I began programming in Scratch, and made a real-time raytracer (supporting Newtonian lower speeds of light and gravitational lensing) before moving onto Python, in which I have written a tablebase program. One of its purposes is generating, rendering and "optimising" state transition diagrams of chess endgames in 3D (with springs and repulsion), it has a mode for exhaustive oscillator searches in bounded regions (unfortunately only feasibly up to 5*5) in cellular automata (currently only INT rules without b0) and using its 3D engine for state transition diagrams (like the Wolfram demonstration except they are 2D states in a 3D space instead of 1D and 2D), it takes quadratic time to simulate physics because it doesn't have a fast multipole method implementation. It supports topological manifolds (in both chess and CA) but only reduces the number of states to search by considering only those nonequivalent under symmetry, not vertex-transitivity (as is allowed by some manifolds). Here is the discussion thread :-)
Its purposes for chess, though less elementary, are also related to the broader study of recursive application of simple functions (albeit on finite graphs instead of infinite planes), that give rise to phenomena like the KRvK DTM distribution with respect to board width. The question "How many nonequivalent positions on an n*n board are checkmate in k half-moves" is only computable as a finite polynomial with respect to n for k<=3, after which the only fitting polynomials for the known terms exceed degree 6, which is the maximum it can be without growing faster than the number of states (though I haven't computed it very far yet so don't know whether a difference polynomial for accounting for parity could exist).
I have become quite busy with real-life work as of late, however, so cannot do so much recreational programming for the time being.