What object am I referring to in this sentence?

I apologize if my question is too basic, my English is a little rusty and I have always had trouble with this concept:

Consider the following sentence:

Once I finished the project, I found that generating a beautiful image with a ray-tracer is a lot more challenging than actually implementing one.

When I say "implementing one", am I referring to "a beautiful image" or to "a ray-tracer". I would like to refer to "a ray-tracer", but I am unsure about which one is being addressed here.

Solution 1:

As a native speaker, my first interpretation is that one refers to beautiful image. It was only the disconnect between "implenting" and "image" that made me stop and reconsider.

The reason is that you're saying that generating is harder than implementing so the assumption is that you're doing those two actions to the same object -- in this case, the image. (How you generated the image -- i.e., with a ray-tracer -- is irrelevant to the parallelism of the sentence structure.)

If you want to avoid this ambiguity, you could say:

Once I finished the project, I found that using a ray-tracer to generate a beautiful image is a lot more challenging than actually implementing one.

or even:

Once I finished the project, I found that using a ray-tracer is a lot more challenging than actually implementing one.

Hope this helps!

Solution 2:

The "one" refers to "a beautiful image" for the reason stated above - "with a ray tracer" adds information in a prepositional phrase, and is neither an object or subject here. But it still adds information about the image, so the sentence could be understood this way ...

"I found that generating a beautiful image with a ray-tracer is a lot more challenging than actually implementing (a beautiful image with a ray-tracer)."

The difficulty with this sentence for me is the use of the words "implement" and "generate". I'm not sure what a "ray-tracer" is, but I understand the concept of "generating an image with a ray-tracer", I'm just not sure what you are trying to "implement".

It sounds to me that you can 1. Generate images and then 2. Implement those images and that you are saying that it is easier to 1. Generate an image with a ray-tracer but that 2. an image generated with a ray-tracer is not as easy to implement (use) as it is to generate.

That is how I would read the sentence.

Solution 3:

tl;dr The object you're referring to is the ray-tracer.

You're asking about this sentence:

Once I finished the project, I found that generating a beautiful image with a ray-tracer is a lot more challenging than actually implementing one.

There are (at least) a couple of ways to parse this.

The most straightforward approach is to consider generating and implementing to be parallel terms, making implementing refer to the beautiful image:

• generating (a beautiful image) ... is more challenging than ... implementing one

However, beautiful images aren't usually described in English as being implemented. They might be generated, drawn, etc, but implementation doesn't fit - it makes the image sound as if it's a procedure. Ngram shows that "implement an image" is much rarer than "generate an image". Clicking through to the underlying documents indicates that even on those rare occasions, it's the image crop, image map or image viewer that's being implemented, not the image itself.

Since implementing is such a poor fit with image, it would be more natural to parse the sentence the following way:

• (generating a beautiful image with) a ray-tracer is more challenging than ... implementing one

This essentially says that doing something with X is harder than making X. Replacing the second 'X' with a pronoun to better match your sentence, we can rephrase it to say using X is harder than making it.

Parsed this way, implementing is placed in parallel with generating a beautiful image with, and one refers to the ray-tracer.

This parsing to associate one with ray-tracer is natural because of the extremely weak association between implementing and image. However, if you wished to make it clearer, you might prefer to place implementing more directly in parallel with, say, using:

• Once I finished the project, I found that using a ray-tracer to generate a beautiful image is a lot more challenging than actually implementing one.