Hitherto, most of the focus in the brick world has been on counting them. See, for example, reference 1. Then yesterday, out of the blue, saw a new departure in the form of a two-headed pile, snapped above.
We define a perfect two dimensional pile as one which starts, for example, with ten bricks on the first row at the bottom, then nine bricks on the next and so on up to one on the short tenth row with just one brick at the top. Using the school-room formula of 0.5*N*(N+1), this gives a total of 55 bricks - putting aside, for the moment, the awkward boundary condition of my only working with 16 bricks.
So the two headed pile, snapped above, contains two perfect piles: a left hand one on a basal row of four bricks and a right hand one on a basal row of three bricks. With one brick shared between the two piles, giving us the masonic equivalent of the covalent bond known to chemists. With the end marker brick out right.
What needs to be done now is to generalise the perfect piles to two dimensions, possibly using square rather than rectangular bricks, and to see what can be done with the bonding of perfect piles there.
Perhaps something that the popular computer game Minecraft could help with, Minecraft being very into construction, in something of the same way as Lego. They can probably do square bricks without needing to put in a special order. Probably hexagonal bricks too. And one could do the work indoors, more comfortable on days when it is either very wet or very hot. See reference 2.
Reference 2: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/.
No comments:
Post a Comment