Monday, March 24, 2014 Volume 57, Number 4 Daily Bulletin 57th Spring North American Bridge Championships
[email protected] Editors: Brent Manley and Sue Munday And the Oscar goes to … Matthew McConaughey ... Cate Blanchett … Brad Pitt … Greg Humphreys? Sure enough, Humphreys – card player, Google guy and Bridge Winners’s chief geek – nabbed an Oscar last month for movie-making technical achievement. “We were completely surprised!” says Humphreys who, in 2004, co-wrote a text with Matt Pharr and Pat Hanrahan called “Physically Based Rendering.” Richard Coren and Bobby Levin celebrate their “This is the first win in the Platinum Pairs Academy Award of any kind ever given for a book,” says Humphreys. He extraordinary book that explains and shares the Levin and Coren romp in attempts to demystify his award-winning, technical technology.” mumbo jumbo: “Our book shows how to make According to Humphreys, the Sci/Tech awards Platinum Pairs pictures with computers that are photo-realistic. start with a self-nomination process. There were Bobby Levin and Richard Coren took control This involves a lot of gory mathematics to properly 11 nominations vying for the award the ‘Physically of the Norman Kay Platinum Pairs going into capture how cameras and the human eye work, Based Rendering” squad ultimately received. the second final session, and didn’t let up. Their how light interacts with matter and scatters around “Because we didn’t think we could ever win such a blistering 68% evening session left the closest between objects or through fog, why different thing, we would never self-nominate,” he says.