techmangle

I'm watching this show on the DARPA Urban Challenge. Some team's truck, which is supposed to drive itself through a city environment, is hitting some wall. The team decide the sensors are functioning perfectly, therefore it's clearly a software problem. The software guy calmly informs his team that he can quickly reprogram the car and fix the shit. Then we see the guy inserting a line of code in some if () block. There's only one problem. The code is clearly using OpenGL to draw some lines. Whaaaaat? Nice.
This reminded me of another show I saw some years ago, where they were talking about realistically rendering moving water using computers. They took the Navier-Stokes equations that describe liquid motion and "simplified" them by either making them a puzzle and shooting out pieces, or by deleting the right hand side. This "simplification" supposedly allowed the simulation/rendering program to run at reasonable speed.