Message #1895

From: Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Re: yet more new puzzles and a prize
Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2011 14:58:45 -0500

Middle-mouse drag will do a rotation for you (or on a laptop, left+right
drag at the same time).

I find the noncommutative panning in spherical/hyperbolic spaces really
neat too (doesn’t happen for Euclidean space, so middle-mouse control is
required there). The code for Don’s hyperbolic tesselations
applet<http://www.plunk.org/~hatch/HyperbolicApplet/>was super helpful
in understanding and implementing this. Internally, you
can see he played with a few different motion models, some of which
anti-precess rather than precess! That is, dragging clockwise results in a
counterclockwise rotation of the space. I found that I liked the one he
settled on for his applet the best too, though it’d be nice to add in some
of the others as an option.

seeya,
Roice

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 1:39 PM, schuma <mananself@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Roice,
>
> I’ve never realized this way to "cheat" to get the global orientation.
> Also, if the piece finding function is added, getting the global
> orientation is trivial.
>
> Between piece-finding and macros, I think the macros help me more in terms
> of solving. But even with none of them, I think I will attempt to solve the
> ET {3,7}.
>
> Just now I wanted to propose a "rotation" function in addition to panning.
> But then I realized that for hyperbolic puzzles, rotation can actually be
> done by dragging circularly. That is, if you drag (= pan) the hyperbolic
> plane in a circle clockwise, the net effect is that the puzzle is rotating
> clockwise. The larger the circle, the faster it rotates. It’s a enjoyable
> way to do rotation and I’m very happy with it. It’s a (noncommutative)
> property of panning, just like if you roll a ball on the floor on a small
> circle for a while, the net effect is rotation along the vertical axis.
>
> Nan