At 17:58, I bought the book Eindexamenwerk 1983 written by Sipke Huisman
in Dutch and published by Akademie voor beeldende kunst AKI in 1983
from thrift store Het Goed for € 1.50.
This afternoon, I went to Tetem art space to
have a quiet look at Walk-in Worlds. I watched the following three
Virtual Reality 360° movies: Celebrating the Holy Object: You,
Passing Down Poetry, and The Big Dance. The first one was
recorded in Rijksmuseum Twenthe in the exhibition Ars Longa, which I
visited last year. Next, I went to
bookshop Broekhuis. On the top floor, I
watched the exhibition with works by Simone
Zacharias. I had seen this before briefly. I was intriged by the work
Paarse Dag 2 and consider to buy it. At 16:40:50, I bought the following
two books:
Ready Player One written by Ernest Cline in English and published
by Random House in 2018,
ISBN:9780525574347, for € 5.00.
The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle, written in
English and published by Taschen in 2016,
ISBN:9783836555821, for € 11.95.
There was a lot of snow today, but it was mostly wet
snow. At the end afternoon, the snow began to stay at some places.
This evening, I saw the exhibitionThe Red
Line at the Vrijhof building of the University of Twente. This exhibition
shows pictures taken by the members of Amateur Photographers Association Drienerlo Foton around the theme of a
red robe, which occurs in almost all pictures, and in the exhibition connects
the pictures.
This morning, I wondered what are all the areas that you can create with a
(possibly irregular) convex hexagon on a triangular grid. The smallest such a
haxagon consists of six triangles. By extending one side with four triangles,
you get an irregular convex hexagon of ten triangles. It seems that there are
some considerable gabs. I wrote a small program to find all sizes below a
hundred, and it found that the following sizes (larger than six) are not
possible: 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 20, 21, 23, 29, 36, 39, 41, 44, and 84. I
was surprised about the lonely 84 and wondered whether there might be another
much higher lonely number. Also wondered whether it would be possible to
proof that above a certain number, all numbers occur as the size of such a
hexagon. This evening, I realized that it is probably easy to proof this. A
triangle grid is equivalent with a square gird with one diagonal added. Then
every hexagon fits in a rectangle where two opposite corners have a triangle
removed. The number of triangles in the rectangle is twice the height times
the width. The size of the triangles that are removed is equal the square of
the size (along the side of the rectangle). Because there are two corners, the
combination of values that can be substracted increases with a power of two
by the smallest height or width. Thirtheen is the first number, where there all
the combinations are sufficient. Or in other words, for each number from 336
and above, there is a rectangle of height thirteen and a width equal or larger
than thirteen with some corners removed with the required number of triangles.
I wrote a program to verify this.
This evening, I went to Tetem art space to
listen to the talk Gestuurd door techniek: Meegaan of weerstand bieden?
(Steered by technology: Go with it or resist it?) by Peter-Paul Verbeek. The talk started a little late. (I wrote the following
during the talk. It is my intepretation of what the speaker said.) Yesterday
there was a news item about parents tracking
children (through their mobile phones). It turned out that actually quite a
number of parents are doing this. Parents think that it is go to use this
technology. Another example is how people are always on their smartphone. There
were also technology designed to steer us, such as speed cameras. There are
also people against them and even destroy them. But these people do not realize
that the roads are also designed in such a way that they control our behaviour.
Why we do not design cars such that they cannot drive too fast. Probably, many
people would be against this, because they would feel that it limits their
autonomy. Speed bumps are also designed to change our behaviour: to make us
brake our speed. Nowadays, we have the problem with fake news. Social media
have started to control our thoughts. The first industrial revolution was the
first large scale experiment with technology. Marx realized how this was tied
in with capitalism. The movie Modern Times wanted to show that
technology is steering people: how people become slaves of the machines.
Currently, we are said to be in the fourth industrial revolution. Now there
are also people who are against it. What is a stake now? We would like to split
the world into subjects and objects. But maybe it is not possible to make such
a clear a cut. Probably, they are always intertwinned. We create technology,
but technology also change us. Technologies are often used for moralisation.
Hans Achterhuis came with the proposal to moralisation of machines. People
critized him about this. But that this week, there was a very big traffic
accident on the high way due to heavy fog. The book Nudge by Richard H.
Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. 80% of the choices we make are habits. Maybe only
10% of our choices are conscious choices. There are very subtile ways to
influence the behaviour of people. Persuasive Technology by B.J. Fogg.
To use technology to persuate you in a certain direction. About autonomy.
Technology is so much a part of our life, that we cannot escape it. Think, for
example, think about the birth controll pill. It has had such an influence on
our ethics. Kant said that the three big questions are: What can I know? What
should I do? And what can I hope for? Technology has given us some answers on
these questions. Steven Dorrestijn said that technologies work in four areas:
Before the eye (persuasion, suggestion), to the hand (coercion, mediated
gestures), behind the back (trends, user configuration), and above the head
(utopian technology, dystopian technology). There are two axes about influence:
from hidden to apparent and from weak to strong. Resulting in four quadrants:
Coercive, persuasive, seduction, and decisive. The last is maybe the most
scarry. Design mediations. You have a social goal: you want to have some
desired behaviour. From this you have to design technology that encourage this
behaviour. Design for environmental behaviour. Some one form Taiwan made him
realize how much we here in the West are attached to our autonomy, even if it
is clear that in the future it will destroy our world and make autonomoy
completely irrelevant.
After the talk, I made some mention of the book On Photography by
Susan Sontag to the speaker. Afterwards, I found it a pitty that the speaker
did not address the possible impact of AI on our lives in the coming twenty
years.
I went to the opening of the exhibition of
Björn Zielman at B93. His exhibition also
contained paintings by his mother Lammie and sculptures by his aunt Nancy. I
also met with two of the members of Heliophile. One of them, under the artist
name AcheFace, gave
a performance on a modular synthesizer. I also met some other people and
talked with them. I stayed for about an hour.
This evening, I went to see the exhibitionI owned a tree by Linda Vilka
at the Tankstation in Enschede. Later, I also went to Concordia and saw the
exhibition Inktspot of a hundred political cartoons from Dutch
newspapers. I also played a little with some musical art works that are part
of the exhibition Ik zie ik zie wat jij niet hoort (I see what you do
not hear), which is geared towards children.
Yesterday, I got news that Martin Medema died
during the night of Monday to Tuesday and that there would be a short memoral
service this morning. I doubted a long time whether I should go, because it was
on Friday, June 12, 2009 that I met him for the
last time. I met him shortly after I arrived at the University of Twente,
usually at (board) game club Fanaat. I am happy that I did go. I discovered that until recently (when
he became ill), he was a frequent guest at Fanaat. Almost half of the
attendees where current members of Fanaat, students of the University. But
there were also some people from the early eighties, some of which had not seen
Martin for much longer than me. Arjan and Erik,
as long time members of Fanaat, also attended. (The only person, I had expected
to see, did not come.) Someone from the eighties had brought a seven hexes
segment and placed it on the coffin with six wooden round stones of different
colour on top of it. These are used in the game Atlantis. After the nephew of Martin said some words, several other people
said some words, often telling how Martin had taught them important lessons in
life, about trusting and living an alternative, nomadic life-style.
I have installed Unbutu on johan. I
installed it on the disconnected hard-drive that I put in place as an
anti-virus back-up. It appeared that this drive was also seen as the first
drive. So, now johan is a dual-bootable PC. I noticed that Firefox
does not run very smooth under Unbutu and that it having similar problems with
playing videos, like it has under Windows XP. I would think that it is related
to my graphics card not being fully supported anymore.
Last Monday, I came across the China Labyrinth and the Octopuszle. Yesterday, I wrote a program to generate an Exact Cover
for this problem and last night I ran my Exact
Cover solver on it, but it did not find any solutions. Today, I discovered
that others tried it
before and did find solutions using a Python 3 Exact Cover solver. This was
also refered to in a
Hacker News thread about Organicity in abstract strategy games.
Anneke Treep discussed it in the March and July 1990 issues of Cubism For Fun newsletter.
Thinking about the Octopluszle and the lack of
succes of making any progress, I decided to see if converting the problem into
a Boolean satisfiability problem would be an option, knowing that there is
a lot of research going on SAT solvers. I came across Solving Exact Cover via SAT, which happens to be from the same person who
tried to solve the Octopuszle with an Exact Cover solver almost a year before.
We could conclude from this, that he did not make much progress and that the
Octopuszle is indeed a very hard puzzle.
I went to the opening of the exhibitionCome
together in a dream by Emmy
Zwagers at XPO. I liked her work acryl op
paper 300x400 2017. I understand that for her the process of making the
work is as important as the result.
Yesterday, I got an idea for finding solutions for the Octopuszle. The idea is to split the large puzzle in four by four smaller
puzzles. If you look at only the horizontal and vertical lines, then there are
652 solutions of all possible pieces within four by four pieces. I discovered
that there are no solutions when you only look at the diagonal lines. This
night, I ran the Exact Cover solver to figure out how many solutions there
are for filling a four by four square with all of the pieces, such that there
is exactly all the pieces are used when ignoring the diagonals. The answer was
170,917,888. Today, while biking, I concluded that there might not by any
solution at all, simply because of the pieces that are needed at the border.
Not suprisingly, 170,917,888 is equal to 652 times two to the power 18. I have
no idea how to proceed from here.
Annabel and I went to see the movieAlita:
Battle Angel. We both did not have high expectations of this movie, but we
both enjoyed it very much hoping that a sequel will be made soon.
This afternoon, I thought about the hexagon numbers not
with triangles but with hexagons on the corners of the triangles. That is
because I wanted to know if there is a hexagon with 64 smaller hexagons. If
every side should have more than one hexagon, the smallest configuration you
can create, consists of seven hexagon. The following sizes, above seven, are
not possible: 8, 9, 11, 15, and 17. There are several ways to make a hexagon
with 64 hexagons and the most round shape seems to have sides of lengths going
round: four, seven, four, five, six and five.
This morning, between seven and eight, the temperature was still around
-1° Celsius, but around four in afternoon, it reached
19.2° Celsius. Very likely a record, probably also for the whole
month of February.
This months interesting links
