Subject:
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Re: Is lego *truly* unlimited? (some thoughts)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Wed, 8 Dec 2004 13:10:47 GMT
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Viewed:
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1075 times
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In lugnet.general, Samarth Moray wrote:
> I was just wondering today about how much lego is trumpeted as having an
> 'unlimited' number of possibilites. Now I'm no math whiz, but it seemed
> logically impossible to me. So here's some food for thought for the gurus out
> there to digest and make sense of:
>
> Each lego brick has a limited number of uses. A *very* small example of this
> would be two 1 x 1 bricks, can only be connected together in one way
Ahh, but that isn't true -- rotate one of the pieces. There are, in fact, an
infinite number of ways to connect those two 1 x 1 bricks. (Of course, you
probably can't tell the difference between two 1x1 bricks connected at 22
degrees and 22.00001 degrees.)
Not only that, there's more where that came from. You might think there's only
three ways to connect two 1x2 plates. That's not true either. Ignoring
rotations when there's only one stud connecting the two pieces, put one plate so
that it's wedged between the two studs of the other piece. There are two
different orientations you can do that in... but not only are there different
orientations, you can do it at different points along both the long and the
short side. Since there are an infinite number of points along a line, there
are an infinite number of ways to do that... though once again, not all are
discernably different.
-=- James Mastros,
occasional pendant
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Is lego *truly* unlimited? (some thoughts)
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| I was just wondering today about how much lego is trumpeted as having an 'unlimited' number of possibilites. Now I'm no math whiz, but it seemed logically impossible to me. So here's some food for thought for the gurus out there to digest and make (...) (20 years ago, 8-Dec-04, to lugnet.general, lugnet.build)
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