It's a reflective time of year and I wanted to thank everyone in our community who has made the success of this group possible, members and speakers, tutorial leaders and helpers, and of course SkillsMatter too.
Painting Robot
We were very lucky to have Jose Salatino fly in from Spain with his robot.
Jose's robot is unique because it doesn't just draw shapes and fill them with colour like a pen plotter. Instead, it has learned to mix real wet pain, and even refresh the brush with water.
During the session, the robot gradually built up layers of paint, until the image was almost complete. Jose and his robot attracted a lot of interest from our group, and even from the venue's own staff too!
The sophistication required of an algorithm as it builds up an image from wet paint, which can mix if applied naively, is significant. The order of shapes and colours itself has to be considered carefully if one paint colour is not to overpower another. If you're a painter, you'll have your own method of applying paint, perhaps you'll apply darker colours first with highlights later. This empathy goes to show how much work has gone into making a painting robot which makes it look easy.
You can find out more about Jose's work here:
Light Effects
Regular member, speaker and helper Peter has several other interests including building things with hardware and developing domain specific languages.He brought along an array of LED's which was built similar to a much larger "theatre-size" structure he made for another project.
He demonstrated his domain specific language, controlling the lights to make engaging effects, and his work attracted a lot of interest and participation too!
We had a short chat and it was clear that in the wider industry, the hardware for event and theatrical lighting is good but the software for controlling it not so good. His domain specific language certainly fills a gap that many others feel.
Double-Pendulum Chaos
Hector, a mathematician, is doing some work exploring visualisations of the range of behaviours that a double-pendulum can have.A double pendulum is just a pendulum attached to another. A simple pendulum's motion is fairly simple - it moves from left to right with varying amplitude and speed. A double pendulum can move in this simple way too, but only for small perturbations from its resting hanging position. For staring positions that are further from this we start to see non-trivial behaviour, and mathematical chaos emerges.
One of his works takes a starting position of a double pendulum, the angle of each pendulum, and calculates how it moves for a fixed period of time. It then starts the double pendulum again from the same starting position, but changed by a very small amount. The movement is calculated for the same amount of time. The final position could be very similar to where the first pendulum ended up .. or it could be wildly different .. or somewhere in between.
This mathematical experiment measures the sensitivity of the double pendulum from that starting position. The starting position is two numbers, the two angles, and these can be mapped to a two dimensional surface.
Here is a visualisation created in the same way for a similar dynamic system. The animation is jusst varying another parameter. The result is very mesmerising!
I love this work because it focusses very much on a mathematical phenomenon, and without too many steps uncovers the hidden beauty of the laws which govern the motion of s simple system, a double pendulum that a child can make.
Game Theory and Fractals
Ben has also done some innovative work visualising how games play. He considers how simple, and not so simple, games can evolve as players take turns within the rules of the game.
By considering all possible outcomes, for a given depth into the game, he is able to visualise maps of outcomes.
Not only do the visuals show hot-spots and black-spots, advantageous and disadvantageous positions, the visuals are often fractal in nature.
You can read more about his work here:
- Part 1 - https://www.purplecrane.com/blog/posts/2018/11/02/visualising-games-as-fractals
- Part 2 - https://www.purplecrane.com/blog/posts/2018/12/11/visualising-games-as-fractals-showing-player-choice
Journal Of Mathematics And The Arts
Mara, editor of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, was kind enough to provide copies of their journal for members to have a look at, take a free copy, and hopefully subscribe to.
We're particularly grateful as this gift is of not of small value.
Conclusion
In the almost 2 years we've been running, we've never had a session like this - without a talk or tutorial - so I wasn't sure if it was going to work. Even our hackathons were structured in some way.Luckily members seemed to really enjoy the opportunity to just mingle and talk - something we rarely get time to do during our normal events.
I did discuss with a few people the low numbers of female members, which is is contrast to the normal events which I'm pleased to say welcome a good number of women. The best answer we came up with was that events promoted as socials might mean some people behaving inappropriately and put people off from coming. Something to think more about for me.
I did take the opportunity to project a relaxing video of nature with classical piano music on the room's audio .. and it seemed to create a nice effect, just as it did during a previous hackathon.
Thanks for a great 2018 .. and happy coding for 2019!
