@Scott I can't believe they would insult him by referring to him as a mere software engineer at Google, instead of "Critically acclaimed and academically lauded SIGBOVIK author and core contributor at The Association for Computational Heresy" |
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Tom spotting!
"It’s natural to wonder which other shapes have [Rupert's] property. 'I think of this problem as being quite canonical,' said Tom Murphy, a software engineer at Google who has explored the question extensively in his free time. It 'would have gotten rediscovered and rediscovered — aliens would have come to this one.'"
https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-shape-found-that-cant-pass-through-itself-20251024/ |
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Nice Anonymous: I don't know where the dry salt bed comes from, but http://radar.spacebar.org/f/a/weblog/comment/1/1201 already calls it traditional. |
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15021. Nice Anonymous (ok, actually just Scott) (135.180.35.252) –
10 Oct 04:09:47
[ And now I am 46 ]
Happy birthday! I loved the video, but over the course of this journey I got surprisingly attached to the snub cube, and I'm sad not to know whether our snub cube buddy is in fact Rupert or Nopert. Also unsure if the dry salt bed is just a delightful non sequitur or callback to a previous Tom project I missed. I did somehow overlook Harder Drive until now... must not have been checking your blog that spring. So that was an unexpected bonus to find. |
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15020. Slightly Less Mean Anonymous (185.219.214.117) –
06 Oct 08:14:37
[ And now I am 46 ]
OK the 'file handle' pun made me laugh |
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15018. Anonymous (62.216.208.215) –
28 Sep 10:50:04
[ Points intact! ]
Hey, Tom!
It is not in English, but maybe you will enjoy it.
Here is a song with 1329 distinct words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAOpVxr4ba8
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15017. jonas (37.191.60.209) –
23 Sep 10:10:23
[ Scoopert! ]
Oh, I get it! The polyhedron in the new paper is central symmetric, which means every orthogonal projection of it is also central symmetric. That's why they didn't have to bother with translations. Whereas you are interested in the snub cube, and that isn't central symmetric. And your 20 vertex “potential Nopert number 214” isn't central symmetric either. |
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15016. Tom 7 (163.5.171.116) –
22 Sep 12:53:57
[ Scoopert! ]
Eli: I noticed this too, while deep in the guts of my video editing, which is the worst time to have a computer emergency. In case anyone is interested, it was a true "straw that broke the camel's back" scenario where a 20 year-old bug finally caused my server to regularly run out of memory and OOM-loop. I had been looking for obscure memory or resource leaks for years, but the bug turned out to be trivial: I didn't know this but shell scripts do not forward SIGTERM to their child processes! So when apache2 would helpfully recycle my processes to prevent memory leaks etc., it was actually just making them into zombies and filling up my poor server's meager RAM. The fix was just to "exec" the binary from the shell script. OMG.
Jonas: I wonder if I subconsciously remember that from the ICFP 2000 task! I fondly remember participating in that one as an undergrad.
> I don't like the animation near
Yeah. I recorded myself hand-lettering that section and gave myself hand cramps, but when I looked at the video I was capturing the wrong window the whole time. So I had to fake it with the auto-animate program. I am aware it looks silly but I thought maybe it would at least be amusingly silly.
Snapping vertices to edges: We did contemplate this kind of thing. It makes sense, although it also adds a significant proof obligation (and we're already pushing it) to show that this search strategy would be complete. The main thing is that this kind of geometric reasoning is hard to do when the hulls are not concrete (because the endpoints are intervals). Or rather: You can do it but without additional care to avoid the dependency problem, it often ends up being counterproductive.
Anonymous: Some of the drawings are screen captured from Photoshop, but I think you're asking about the automatic ones. This is software I wrote (technically part of BoVeX) to create a video from a final image. Mainly I don't want people to have to stare at a static image when the voiceover is more than a few seconds. You have a keen eye: It does draw over areas. This is because it first heuristically creates layers from the final image as part of its plan. It then simplifies them to create color blobs from disconnected pieces, or keeps the pen down when it's moving—as long as it knows that it will be inked over later. I agree that it often still looks unnatural... every time I use it I add some more tweaks!
Thanks Nels! |
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15015. Tom 7 (163.5.171.4) –
22 Sep 09:20:12
[ June 2024 ]
Sorry that this took forever, but I checked in the aged fork of llama that I had made! Now BoVeX can probably compile with ENABLE_LLM from the repository. That project moves fast so my condolences if you try to synchronize to the latest version, but it should contain all the mysterious changes that I forgot how/why I did them. |
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15014. Nels (73.78.20.14) –
21 Sep 22:10:22
[ Scoopert! ]
Thanks Tom this was a very dramatic video, respect |
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Also upload this to Steam, I will pay the $100 fee. |
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15011. Anonymous (159.153.101.6) –
19 Sep 07:26:00
[ Scoopert! ]
Hi Tom, this is a mostly unrelated question and you might have covered this before but I really want to ask -
How do you do the animated MSPaint(ish) drawings that appear in your videos? I've been trying to work it out.
On the one hand it doesn't seem like it could be an actual recording of the drawing process because they are drawn in a very unnatural way - blocking in colours before linework, random splodges of colour appearing that later turn out to be a small part of a face, etc.
On the other hand it also seems to have some artefacts in the animation that seem like they couldn't have been generated from a static final images - areas that get overdrawn or redrawn. |
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15010. jonas (88.87.242.184) –
17 Sep 15:29:07
[ Scoopert! ]
Tom7 released a new video "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH4MviUE0_s" . This is connected to the research described in the SIGBOVIK 2025 article about Rupert property of polyhedrons, but talks about some progress after the publication of the video.
You refer to the unit ball and unit cube. As a historical note, the definitions of these were standardized by the ICFP contest 2000 task specification "https://www.cs.cornell.edu/icfp/task.htm#sec:prim-objects" . POV-Ray does not consider the unit ball or unit cube particularly important. The POV-Ray function to create a sphere "https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/r3_4.html#r3_4_5_1_12" is parametrized by the center and radius of the ball, and the function to create a cube "https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/r3_4.html#r3_4_5_1_2" actually makes a cuboid with edges aligned with the coordinate system but is parametrized by two opposite corners of the cuboid.
I don't like the animation near "https://youtu.be/QH4MviUE0_s?t=2846". The order that you uncover the text seems unnatural.
For the hard polyhedrons, you split the parameter space according to which vertexes of the inner and outer polyhedron are on the convex hull of the projection. I wonder why you don't also assume that two vertexes of the hull of the projected inner polyhedron are on two different sides of the perimiter of the projected outer polyhedron. If there's a solution then there's always a solution of that form. Split the parameter space according to which two vertexes of the inner polyhedron touch the perimeter, and probably also according to which two edges of the outer polyhedron they touch. This would let you eliminate two of the seven real degrees of freedom, because the translation of the two polygons would be uniquely determined. This should work for any convex polyhedron, not
I have received an email reply from Tom, so I can testify that he is not completely bad at email.
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15009. Eli (138.229.159.92) –
17 Sep 02:21:22
[ Scoopert! ]
Oh hey, I got an error when I tried to post that comment. Now half a day later, reloading this browser tab posted the comment. The website is working just fine with no issues now, so false alarm I guess. |
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15008. Eli (138.229.159.92) –
17 Sep 02:17:43
[ Scoopert! ]
Your blog homepage appears to be broken. It spends a suspiciously long time loading, and then the following error message appears underneath the navbar:
[an error occurred while processing this directive] |
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15007. Tom 7 (151.243.141.90) –
10 Sep 08:20:28
[ Scoopert! ]
I'm glad the idea of a long video appeals to some, since I'm up to an hour now!
Getting very close. I'm not allowed to play Silksong until it's done, but my workaround has been to play Spelunky 2. :) |
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15006. KCloudz (136.226.12.181) –
03 Sep 10:32:00
[ Scoopert! ]
Silksong tomorrow!
Hyped for the view video also hehe |
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My kid constantly forgets to turn on the fan when he showers. So I had to show him this blog post. Thanks for keeping it up. |
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Eu sou Brasileiro e jogo escape a alguns anos, criei alguns niveis com meu nome Edvaldo.c, este jogo é incrível. |
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15003. mixmix (27.127.20.65) –
31 Aug 23:57:45
[ Scoopert! ]
It was a smart move to construct a provably non-Rupert polyhedron, but I still wonder whether the rhombicosidodecahedron is a Nopert. Either way, I'm dying to watch the video. And oh boy, 45 minutes! That's longer than ARST ARSW. Thank you Tom! |
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switchback: Hehe! I might use that one.
Anand: Yes, I should make a FAQ! I'm using a Wacom drawing tablet (Intuos; I have owned several of these) and Photoshop, although it might as well be anything since I pretty much just use the "pencil" tool. Photoshop is good though. I capture myself drawing with OBS (excellent) at high bitrate, AV1 (NVENC) and usually record audio at the same time, but I'll often pause drawing to talk or vice versa. Sometimes I dub in audio afterwards. I'm editing in Premiere Pro; the "rate stretch" is a pretty good way to speed up sections of drawing after cutting out the boring parts, although it is VERY tedious to edit video through any method I've ever explored. The new transcription features are very good for this workflow though.
For some of the new videos where I have drawings but didn't capture the process of drawing them (e.g. if I am doing a lot of zooming around it gets pretty whiplashy, or I did it across more than one session) then I wrote some software to "animate" the drawing from the PNG. This is technically part of BoVeX. It's a little lazy compared to the live drawing thing, but it does look better than just staring at a static image! |
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Hi Tom,
Apologies if you've already written about this, but I was wondering what your drawing setup is like (software + hardware). I absolutely love the sped-up drawings in your videos and wanted to try my hand at recreating the style for my own drawings!
Also, hope you're feeling better!
Thanks,
Anand |
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Everything always goes into the square hole! |
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