Don't let someone's proof that some problem is impossible to solve prevent you from solving the problem well
enough to get your work done!
(smartest thing said so far in this whole discussion.)
Well, again, "the sphere packing problem" is different
than that. In fact, there have been some neat breakthru's
in the field. We have 9600 baud and up modems thanks to
a trellis-code based on packing spheres efficiently in
8 dimensions. Turns out a single sphere can be touched
by 1024 spheres in a tightly-packed regular array. =)
That result is basically cool in anyone's book.
The original problem was that given a bunch of spheres
that are the same size, how many can you get to touch a
single sphere at the same time. In 2d, the answer is clearly
6. (try it with pennies.) In 3d, 12 is the answer but if you
look at the spherical cone of impact that each outer sphere
makes, it would seem that 13 COULD be possible. The deal is
that no one has found a function that provably states for
each dimension what the number is. Only a special case exists
for multiples of 8. High-weirdness, plain and simple.
--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)
Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
Please read these before you post! —
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
- a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
Outside of code tags, you may need to use entities for some characters:
| |
For: |
|
Use: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.
|
|
