Programming errors in graphics software can lead to interesting results, quite unlike, say, errors in banking software.
I have several such examples that I will track down and post later.
For now, here is a recent instance.
The screenshots below are from a debugging session on a shadow ray-tracing program.
The program uses a
BSP tree data structure1.
Geometry representing the BSP tree was written out by debugging code and then viewed interactively in maya.
Each box represents a terminal node of the tree.
The colors of the boxes indicate the number of primitives contained in each one, with green having the most
and white the fewest.
In this case, the images are not directly output by the defective program, but I wouldn’t have created the visualization if not for the bug.
1More precisely a kd-trie.