Last week, I looked out the window of my office and saw a parrot. Two of them actually. Apparently San Francisco is home to a wild colony of escaped (released?) Cherry Headed Conures. There is even a documentary about them, but somehow I had seen nor heard of them before.
I promise, these birds were parrots.
Walking back to my desk, I had a moment of inspiration.
The internet is kind of amazing, and I quickly found a website that would sell me parrots in 3 different colors for 39 cents apiece. I think they are supposed to be used as accents for floral centerpieces; I have no idea how anyone is making a profit selling them at that price.
A parrotohedron obviously needs to be pyritohedral, so I started by arranging six sticks pyritohedrally for my parrots to perch on. Then, I arranged 12 parrots (one per stick end) such that each parrot had a friend (and represented one face of a pyritohedron). Squawk! It’s a Polly-hedron.
But will there be a pirate-ohedron? Only time will tell.
ps. Arrr. Where be my two-dimensional parrot?
pps. Polly gone.
First, lets talk a little about 2D hyberbolic tilings for those who haven’t encountered them in the past. On a Euclidean plane, we can tile squares onto a checkerboard such that four corners meet at a point.
A boring Euclidean chess board is a tiling of squares where 4 squares meet at each point.
On a hyperbolic checkerboard more than 4 regular quadrilaterals meet at a vertex when tiling a plane. This means each angle of a square must be less than 90 degrees (if 5 squares meet at a vertex in a planar tiling, then the angles should be 360/5 or 72 degrees).
There are lots of potential regular hyperbolic tilings that we could imagine playing chess on. We’d like to preserve the checkerboard property of our tiling, so we will only consider tilings where an even number of regular polygons meet at a vertex. Here are a few potential tiling candidates drawn using the Poincaré disk model*.
The {4,6} hyperbolic tiling is a tiling of 4-sided polygons (squares) such that 6 of them meet at a vertex. It’s nice because it keeps the shape of the tiles in the checkerboard as squares.
{4, 6} Regular Hyperbolic Checkerboard
A {5, 4} tiling where 4 pentagons meet at a vertex maintains the property that a piece moving along the diagonal can only visit tiles of one of the two colors. On the other hand, it becomes extremely difficult to define the opposite side from a side or the opposite corner from a corner, so moving in a straight line quickly gets messy.
{5, 4} Regular Hyperbolic Checkerboard
Finally, the {6, 4} and {4, 8} tilings start to get pretty busy, but do nicely maintain the idea of having opposite edges well-defined (lacking in a pentagonal tiling), while keeping opposite corners colored the same.
The first issue that we face with our hyperbolic chess board is that it isn’t going to lie flat in 2D Euclidean space, so pieces are going to want to slide off (thanks, gravity!). Thus, playing hyperbolic chess with a physical board requires either that our pieces actually stick to our board (velcro?), that we put up with the large amount of square distortion that occurs when trying to embed a hyperbolic board on a Euclidean plane, or that we write and play our game on a computer.
Looking at the tiling candidates above, the {4, 6} tiling and other square tilings seem like clear winners for our hyperbolic chess game. In particular, it is immediately obvious what it means to travel horizontally and vertically across it.
Examples of rook (blue) and knight (green) moves
The main question is what it means to travel diagonally across the tiling, when leaving a corner of the {4,6} tiling there is one obviously diagonal square, and two still kind of diagonal squares adjacent to it. However, the obviously diagonal square doesn’t share a color with the original square, which means that we lose one of the standard rules of chess – that each bishop can only visit a single color of square. It also more or less ruins the game of checkers, in my opinion. Moreover, if we only allow the “obvious” diagonal, then a bishop would be unable to reach a majority of the squares in the tiling. Therefore, I instead define a ‘reasonable diagonal’ to a square, A, as any square, B, that shares a vertex and a color to A.
For checkers it seems reasonable to allow going to either of them at every diagonal. This seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the game and to be likely to keep game play reasonably balanced.
It’s less clear that this is a good strategy for chess. It certainly makes the pieces that can travel along diagonals much more powerful, as they can now travel to many more squares than ones that can only travel horizontally or vertically. That said, my guess is that a reasonable strategy would be for pieces moving along the diagonal to be able to make a choice when moving out the very first corner to either take the “right” or “left” path and to always take that path on any given move. Thanks to the negative curvature of the board and the straight lines we are requiring, this does leave an interestingly large space that it would take any given piece multiple turns to reach.
An example of a diagonal “bishop” move
Another question is how big to make the surface and where to position the pieces at the start of the game.
Since the horizontal and vertical distances are pretty well defined, we can use them to define the size of the board and the location of the pieces. We start by placing the White queen on a white square. Place a white pawn in a vertically adjacent square. place the remainder of the white pawns such that they are in the same horizontal line as the white pawn you have just placed (with the same number on each side as in chess, of course). Place the remainder of the white pieces such that they are placed correctly as in chess and in the same horizontal line as the white queen. Define one edge of the board as directly behind these pieces.
From the white queen count 7 more squares vertically in the direction of the white pawns, and place the black queen there. Following similar rules to the above, place the remainder of the black pieces and define another edge of the board.
It would be nice to define sides to our board. Unfortunately, this is necessarily not as nice or easy to do as the front and back the way that we have defined the rest of the board. In chess, sides are most important for queening, which only requires the back edge, and for cornering the pieces (ie. the King during endgame). This means that defining sides isn’t strictly necessary, but we could possibly define them anyways by starting from the corner piece and constantly turning towards the center of the board to define side edges.
Pentagons are my favorite polygon, so I’m pretty fond of the {5, 4} tiling. If chess had originally been developed on a board like this, we might imagine that the standard move might involve entering a square on a face and leaving at the opposite vertex or vice versa. Perhaps rooks would have to start their move going across an edge, bishops would have to start going across a vertex, and queens could do either. Knights have the natural travel rule of having to go through an edge, then through one of the two far edges. I love the elegance and naturalness of these rules for the tiling. One might almost imagine that chess was invented for this tiling and that our Euclidean version came out of an attempt to modify the rules to fit a Euclidean chess board.
Examples of moves that a rook (blue arrows) or a knight (pink arrows) could make on this board
I hope you’ve enjoyed our adventures through non-Euclidean chess. It’s interesting to realize how much the apparently** Euclidean nature of our world influences the games that we play and the rules that we make for them. Rules that are straightforward in Euclidean geometry become bizarre, insufficiently well-defined or otherwise sub-optimal in other geometries and vice-versa.
* Hyperbolic tilings were created with the aid of KaleidoTile ** According to general relativity, space is curved, but we don’t notice it so much at our scale
I first posted about an origami model based on a Star Polyhedron in November 2012, but I knew at the time that many more models were possible based off of a similar idea of taking a Star Polyhedron and removing parts of each face such that some underlying topology of the polyhedra was maintained, but the faces no longer intersect. These representation of a star polyhedron can be thought of as ‘topological’ as they emphasize the internal connectedness of these self-intersecting figures.
Unukalhai, below, is a ‘topological’ model based on the Small Triambic Icosahedron and is composed of 60 rectangular sheets of paper folded into identical origami units. Each face is represented by a 3-pronged spiral, and can be thought of as a subsection of a small triambic icosahedron, chosen such that the model can be joined together without self-intersection. Unukalhai was made out of five colors of paper to highlight the natural five-coloring of the icosahedron.
Tania Australis was the first star polyhedra origami piece that I folded, and has been mentioned on this blog before. It is composed of 30 identical ‘S’ shaped pieces that each represent one face of a Great Rhombic Triacontahedron and was inspired by George Hart’s Frabjous sculpture.
Tania Borealis is composed of 30 ‘S’ shaped pieces, put together in the shape of a Medial Rhombic Triacontahedron. It complements Tania Australis, but is much more fragile, so I do not plan to put it on display in Asia.
Today marks the beginning of Mathematics Awareness Month, and this year’s theme is Martin Gardner. Coincidentally, I recently returned from my second trip to the Gathering 4 Gardner (G4G), a recreational math conference with a focus on the sorts of things that Martin Gardner wrote about in is Scientific American column, such as puzzles, magic, mathematical art and other recreational mathematics.
Pretty much everyone who attends is really neat and has done something really cool that was directly or indirectly inspired by Martin Gardner. A number of the attendees are actually professional magicians and one highlight of the event is the astounding evening events and shows.
In addition to organized talks, the highlight of the conference is often just talking to people. I know quite a lot about polyhedra, but I had an interesting discussion with John Conway (who also had the honor of being the theme for this year’s conference) about the naming of the rhombicuboctahedron where I learned some new things that I hadn’t known previously.
My favorite part of G4G is an afternoon excursion devoted to talking and learning things from other attendees, and also to large art sculpture “barn-raisings”. I was one of the six artists that participated in the sculpture event and organized a group to make a construction out of hair bands, a fun precursor to my later talk on a hair tie 120-cell (a 120-cell is a regular 4-dimensional polychoron made out of 120 dodecahedral cells). My creation used a technique for making large geometric constructions out of hair ties that I learned from Zachary Abel at the last G4G.
Here’s a picture of some the team that helped me construct the hair tie construction. Thanks to everyone that helped!
The hair band construction consists of a tetrahedron of green hair bands inside a cube of purple bands, inside an octahedron of black bands. You can see the tetrahedron in the cube fairly well in this close up shot.
G4G has a formal puzzle and art exchange as well as many informal ones. Here are a few of the neat things that I got from G4G11. If you were in doubt about my claim that the people that attend G4G are collectively really cool and amazing, these pictures should probably lay your doubts to rest.
George Hart’s gift exchange item was a set of pre-cut cards that assemble into a Tunnel Cube.
Edmund Harriss laser cut sets of paper pieces that cleverly slotted together. I took two chiral sets of five-pronged pieces and combined them to make this neat woven ball.
Eve Torrence gave me a set of pieces for her gorgeous “Small Ball of Fire”. I love the choice of foam as the material, as it is very forgiving and easy to assemble.
I got this surprisingly fun and meditative marble labyrinth from Bob Bosch.
And two different versions of a square to equilateral triangle dissection. The hinged one was 3d printed by Laura Taalman. The wooden piece is from Dick Esterle
Finally, the gift exchange includes many fun puzzles and papers that are interesting, but not as photogenic. I particularly liked the “turn MI into MU” (solvable variant) puzzle from Henry Strickland.
In my next post, I will talk about my own G4G exchange gift, that you can construct at home even if you didn’t attend G4G!
π day used to be a straightforward holiday for people who love mathematics. Who could possibly dislike a holiday to celebrate a number that has been celebrated across cultures and throughout history? The Egyptians and Babylonians approximated the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The same in Ancient India, China, and Greece. The symbol π itself is newer, but is still over 300 years old.
Only recently have Tauists come along and started their arguments that Pi is wrong. Since then, the Pi and Tau adherents seem to have turned our circles into boxing rings, with Pi on one side and Tau in the other.
The Tauists start it off with a series of quick jabs. Tau is fundamentally simpler. Radius is more fundamental than diameter, the fundamental constant should be based on radius. Radians finally make sense, it goes against intuition to have 2 Pi radians in a circle. Pi is off by a factor of 2. It is unnatural and confusing. It is wrong!
The Pious punch back that Pi has been the constant for thousands of years, that it’s what everyone knows, that nobody naturally draws a line going halfway across a circle. Tauists demonstrate selective bias to prove their point. The area of 1/4 of a unit circle is Pi/4, or Tau/8. Tau is off by a factor of 2. It is unnatural and confusing. It is wrong!
But, in the midst of all this bickering, we lose the fundamental reason why Pi and Tau are so cool. When we get held up in the details, we forget how magical it is that the ratio of a diameter or radius of a circle to its circumference is somehow not something that can be expressed as a ratio at all. That somehow the observed perfection of a circle is due to something truly transcendental. That a circle is itself the perfect shape, minimizing surface area to volume, exhibiting the same curvature everywhere around itself until you get back to exactly where you started.
Tau and Pi aren’t that different. They’re both irrational, they’re both transcendental, they solve all of the same problems. They are, in fact, the same number give or take a factor of 2. Maybe we can just teach everyone both and let people choose for themselves whichever one is easiest for them?
If we celebrate both, that’s twice as many days to get people excited about mathematics. It’s twice as many days to eat pie and appreciate how round it is.
I mean, Tau is just 2*Pi. Er, Pi is just Tau/2. Fine. Tau and Pi differ by just a factor of 2. Sorry. Pi and Tau differ by just a factor of 2. Really, why are we arguing?
So this π day, lets agree to shake hands, stop fighting, and eat some Tau-co Pi. It’s delicious and the fundamental constant that we know and love makes just as beautiful circles whether it’s 3.14… or 6.28…
Squawk! It’s a Polly-hedron.
