[Edu-sig] Project HexaPent

[kirby urner]

On 7/20/06, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > oooo SAT sig
> >
> >        N
> >      _ _ _
> >    /         \
> >    /         \
> >    \   x    /
> >    \ _ _ _ /
> >
> >        S
>
> Trying again.  ASCII art was never my forte.

Looks like resistence is futile in this case, hah hah.

Anyway, from a CS point of view, perhaps the most interesting aspect
is not the GIS/GPS overlay, but simply the datastructure of the
hexapent.  It'd be a lot like a linked list, but with six unique links
to neighboring territories, except in 12 instances, where there'd only
be five.  All of the territories are hexagonal except those 12
pentagonal ones (territories = tiles = cells, on a spherical surface).

So if you're at any hexagon instance, you'll have either five or six
attributes as references to your five or six neighbors.  Probably both
Hexa and Penta classes will be subclasses of Gon, or something along
those lines.

Once you've got the data structure, navigation, of any number of
"turtle selves" is easy.  For a global or flat panel display, you just
need a mapping of cells (internal data objects) to projected widget.
The widget might render with actual global data, giving a panel of
high definition data.  Click to head for one of the neighbors
(whatever API), and boom, the data structure hands back the needed
reference.  You've got another cell rendering instantly (well, OK,
some lag).

Note that hexapents come in multiples of 3 frequency.  If you Google
on Rick Bono and Applied Synergetics, you'll end up at his free DOME
program (already part of the Debian distro), written in C.  A wxPython
version with the same capabilities, including pulling up the rendered
bitmap (via system calls to povray?) might be included?  I'll think
about it.

Kirby