Someone (partly me) derailed the IRC into wild discussion of a math problem. I think some 5-6 people were involved at some points, and we still haven’t arrived at a conclusion as far as I can tell.

Here’s an image I cooked up to help visualize the problem:

The problem is deceptively simple: Determine what angle to fire a bullet in, if it is to hit a target that’s moving past you at a constant velocity. In other words, both objects are moving at a fixed speed, and you just have to figure out in what direction to launch the bullet so that it’ll hit the target perfectly. Iterative solutions need not apply. Good luck with interpreting the image, it’s pretty confus(ed/ing).

Tags: aiming, algorithms, bullets, math