Regruntled.com

Move your mouse over the image!  This is one of those silly JavaScript things that I saw on the net, so I adapted it to a color sudoku. 

Slightly Warped has a collection of unusual knitting pictures.  There seems to a whole cottage industry of demented textile artists:

• Dissected fiber frog
• Mr. Edless
• Crocheted sandwich
• Hognitive dissonance

On the other hand, there is an intersection between textiles and mathematics, still weird but arguably less demented:

• Hyperbolic crocheting
• Catahedron
• Sudoku quilt

A new puzzle from the makers of Sudoku Ball.  There are 16 symbols, and 6 4-by-4 blocks arranged on a sphere, although it might as well be a cube.  The sudoku rules apply: symbols are used once and once in each block, row or column.  The catch here is that the rows and columns extend around the sphere.

In a 16-by-16 sudoku, there are 16 4-by-4 blocks.  Each block interacts with the other 3 blocks horizontally, and the other three blocks vertically, for a total of 6 blocks.  In the Quadoku, each block interacts with all 5 other blocks, but it interacts with the block on the other side of the sphere twice, once with the rows and once with the columns.  So, in a way, each block is involved in 6 block-to-block interactions, just as in the 16-by-16 sudoku.  The difference is that every block interacts with every other block, while in a 16-by-16 sudoku, each block has 9 other blocks that it doesn’t interact with at all. 

6 blocks times 16 cells is 96 cells, compared to 81 cells in a 9-by-9 sudoku and 256 cells in a 16-by-16 sudoku.  With fewer cells and more interconnections, I’d expect it to be a more interesting puzzle than a 16-by-16 sudoku.

In a flat sudoku, I can see everything at once.  I can follow rows and columns with my eyes.  With the Quadoku, I can only see one block at a time and have to manipulate the controls to see the others.  The opposite block is always either flipped vertically (top and bottom) or flipped horizontally (left and right) from the way I last saw it, depending on whether I’m navigating North and South, or navigating East and West.  This is a problem, because I have only so many brain cells left, and I want to use them solving the logic problem.  I don’t want to waste them on hand-eye coordination to manipulate the controls.

I suppose it gets easier with practice.  The more I remember about the contents of the unseen blocks, the less I have to turn the sphere around.  Two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional puzzles are awkward.  What I’d really like to see is an actual object that I can hold in my hands while I solve the puzzle.

I like the contrast between the medium and the message.  The medium is warm and fuzzy, both literally and figuratively.  The message, not so much.  The frog itself is cold and icky.  At best, dissecting a frog in Biology class is something we do because it has to be done.  We’re not proud of it.  We don’t put a frame around it and display it.

Clay Shirky writes in Boing Boing about the traits that make good programmers.  He quotes a study using questions like the one above, given to students on the first day of an introductory programming class:

To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion.

Shirky coins a great phrase, but the study itself is about consistency and rule-following as much as it is about meaninglessness.  The authors themselves introduce meaninglessness by giving  the students a test in a language they don’t understand.  They might as well be giving English speakers a test in Swahili.

It is true that some good programmers have come to programming from mathematics, and that one point of view in the philosophy of mathematics (formalism) holds that mathematics is a game played with meaningless symbols on pieces of paper.  So it is certainly possible to see a connection between programming and meaninglessness.

On the other hand, engineers tend to make good programmers, too, and they’re mainly interested in getting things done in the real world.  If a guy programs a simulation to make sure that a bridge doesn’t fall down, it’s hard to accuse him of meaninglessness.  The shared element is the consistent application of logical rules.