23rd August 2006, 5:00 PM
Tetrisphere, some of you have played it.
So have I.
It always seemed "odd" to me but I could never quite put my finger on it. However, I now realize that what stands before me on my screen is mathematically impossible. The lines that cut it into a grid neither "meet" like a meridian nor do they get smaller and smaller until they reach a "pole" like the equator and it's brethren (the name of which I forget). They are always parallel and they are always the same size, and you see this as you spin it.
Further, upon looking closely at the blocks making up each piece, they do not in fact "shrink" closer to the sphere than away, they actually are made up of cubes with no distortion to make them fit a spherical surface, and there's no distortion ON the ball either. That don't make sense! Perfect squares of that size would result in a "lego block" sphere if anything.
Lastly, an experiment. I took a single piece, which as you know has a fixed orientation and can't be rotated, and attempted to rotate it relative to the sphere. I should have been able to "cheat" it into essentially being in a different orientation. I moved it up north to the top as I could see it, then slid it left back to the same line I had it, and slid it back. Lo and behold, that FELT weird in my EYES, because the thing didn't slide back in horizontally or anything of the sort. The piece was still the same, and the sphere itself was in the same orientation I started with, defying the way a sphere should work.
I had always thought it felt "funny" the way the sphere looked and behaved but could never put my finger on it. Now with some more education I can actually go in there and accurately pinpoint the descrepencies.
What I can't do is figure out how this thing manages to exist in defiance of all logic. Thoughts? And yes, it's a video games, but even in a virtual world a sphere, as a mathematical construct, HAS to behave in certain ways. There's more to this than meets the eye, like a transformer...
So have I.
It always seemed "odd" to me but I could never quite put my finger on it. However, I now realize that what stands before me on my screen is mathematically impossible. The lines that cut it into a grid neither "meet" like a meridian nor do they get smaller and smaller until they reach a "pole" like the equator and it's brethren (the name of which I forget). They are always parallel and they are always the same size, and you see this as you spin it.
Further, upon looking closely at the blocks making up each piece, they do not in fact "shrink" closer to the sphere than away, they actually are made up of cubes with no distortion to make them fit a spherical surface, and there's no distortion ON the ball either. That don't make sense! Perfect squares of that size would result in a "lego block" sphere if anything.
Lastly, an experiment. I took a single piece, which as you know has a fixed orientation and can't be rotated, and attempted to rotate it relative to the sphere. I should have been able to "cheat" it into essentially being in a different orientation. I moved it up north to the top as I could see it, then slid it left back to the same line I had it, and slid it back. Lo and behold, that FELT weird in my EYES, because the thing didn't slide back in horizontally or anything of the sort. The piece was still the same, and the sphere itself was in the same orientation I started with, defying the way a sphere should work.
I had always thought it felt "funny" the way the sphere looked and behaved but could never put my finger on it. Now with some more education I can actually go in there and accurately pinpoint the descrepencies.
What I can't do is figure out how this thing manages to exist in defiance of all logic. Thoughts? And yes, it's a video games, but even in a virtual world a sphere, as a mathematical construct, HAS to behave in certain ways. There's more to this than meets the eye, like a transformer...
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
