Carmack didn't invent BSP trees. He read about them in a paper and produced an efficient implementation that could render a 2D map in 3D using integer math on 386-class CPUs. He has always envied the mathematicians who actually come up with this stuff.
I think he did come up with "Carmack's Reverse" (a dynamic lighting algorithm) independently. But not even the "fast inverse square root" was his; that, oddly enough, came from what is currently probably the premiere AI company: NVIDIA.
But his implementations of these algorithms were indeed beautiful. I suppose AI could do something similar today, because the likes of Carmack had come before. But using AI for code is hobbling the creation of new Carmacks; and humans have the remarkable property that they can learn from other humans and still push the boundaries forward. When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs.
I think he did come up with "Carmack's Reverse" (a dynamic lighting algorithm) independently. But not even the "fast inverse square root" was his; that, oddly enough, came from what is currently probably the premiere AI company: NVIDIA.
But his implementations of these algorithms were indeed beautiful. I suppose AI could do something similar today, because the likes of Carmack had come before. But using AI for code is hobbling the creation of new Carmacks; and humans have the remarkable property that they can learn from other humans and still push the boundaries forward. When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs.