4 ms·
ReferenceFinder: Find coordinates on a piece of paper with only folds
- Ecco 7mo agoThat is really cool. I wish it had an animated video to display the result, that'd be even easier to follow and therefore even more impressive.
- Alifatisk 7mo agoMaybe possible with that DSL the YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown created?
- vismit2000 7mo agoManim
- amelius 7mo agoIs this brute forcing, or is there more to it?
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoThere's more to it. Origami as a calculation tool is more powerful than compass and straight edge.
- CrazyStat 7mo agoIs there? I followed the link[1] to the original author of the desktop software this web app is derived from, and he says: > To make a long story short, by the third generation of ReferenceFinder (written in 2003), I had incorporated all 7 of the Huzita-Justin Axioms of folding into the program, allowing it to potentially explore all possible folding sequences consisting of sequential alignments that each form a single crease in a square of paper. Of course, the family tree of such sequences grows explosively (or to be precise, exponentially); but the concomitant growth in the availability of computing horsepower has made it possible to explore a reasonable subset of that exponential family tree, and in effect, by pure brute force, find a close approximation to any arbitrary point or line within a unit square using a very small number of folds. (emphasis added) [1] https://langorigami.com/article/referencefinder/ https://langorigami.com/article/referencefinder/
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoThere's brute force involved, but it's not brute force by itself. It's like a chess engine, which yes, it checks thousands of positions, but only after filtering out hundreds of thousands of positions.
- CrazyStat 7mo agoAre you involved in writing or maintaining this software? If so can you provide some more details on this “filtering”? Because I skimmed the source code [1] and it looks to me like it’s pure brute force building a database of lines and points up to a certain rank (number of operations required to create that line/point) and then searching through it. [1] https://github.com/MuTsunTsai/reference-finder-cpp/blob/main/source/model/ReferenceFinder.cpp https://github.com/MuTsunTsai/reference-finder-cpp/blob/main...
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoNo, you are right. The author even uses the expression "by pure brute force". I just supposed it would given that virrually every number a user would input is constructible with foldings.
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoI enjoy when HN surfaces out-of-the-box type stuff like this. Very cool.
- scoot 7mo ago“outside of the box”?
- srean 7mo agoFolding is more powerful than ruler and compass constructions. One can do cube roots, angle trisections and more. Coincidentally enough, I had mentioned straight edge and ruler constructions in a different thread a few minutes ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112418 Related older thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222882
- analog8374 7mo agoFolding could be called a superset of measuring. Measuring could be called a special case of folding (it's an accordian fold)