3D Paper Physical Model

The problem

Back in 1996 I was working for the Symbolic Computation Group at the University of Waterloo, developing algorithms and code...

MapleSim has been delivering unique advantages in physical modeling and system simulation for many years. Today we release the latest iteration: MapleSim 5. Looking back at some of the earlier versions of our software, it is hard to believe that this is the same product; from the user interface to the component libraries to the simulation engine, every part of the system has experienced a striking evolution.

Like its predecessors, MapleSim 5 is based on the Maple mathematical...

I recently stumbled upon a hypnotic video of 15 out-of-phase pendulums from a physics experiment at Harvard University.

The...

Another feature added to Maple 15 partially in response to the MaplePrimes forums is the new/improved ?HTTP package.  It provides one-step commands for fetching data from the web: much simpler than using the ?Sockets package directly. In most cases, the command ?HTTP,Get is what you would use:

 (s, page, h) := HTTP:-Get("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors"):

The above fetches the HTML source of a page from Wikipedia and stores it as a string 'page'. The other two outputs are 's', and integer HTTP status code and 'h' a table of the headers returned in the HTTP response from the server.  Compare this to the amount of code needed to fetch data in my Baby Names application for Maple 12, for example.

In part due to a large number of requests on MaplePrimes, the command ?plottools,getdata was added to Maple 15. This new command gives programmers a better way to access the internals of plots and do things with the data they contain.

I was trying to come up with something really fun to do with this command, and another recent obsession came to mind: the game Minecraft.  Minecraft is nice, since like Maple it is written in Java and runs on lots of platforms!  For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a a sort of mostly unstructured "sandbox" game. The player starts in alone in a procedurally generated landscape consisting of blocks. They player can collect blocks with their hands or with tools and they use them to build new things. The wide array of things that people create in Minecraft is staggering.

So, I thought I would write some commands to export 3D plots in Maple to block structures in Minecraft.

In high school I was briefly fascinated by a triangular "jump all but one" game, commonly found at Cracker Barrel restaurants.  The basic premise is that any peg can "jump" over an adjacent peg to occupy the empty hole next to the jumped peg.  The jumped peg is then removed.  The goal is to continue jumping pegs until there is only one left.  

The instructions on the face of the Cracker Barrel version of this game say, "LEAVE ONLY ONE -- YOU'RE A GENIUS".  Wanting to claim the right to call myself a genius, unlike ordinary kids, who might just play the game a few times, I sat down on my Turbo-XT and started writing BASIC code.  The algorithm I came up with ran a bit slow, so I directed output to my printer and let it run over night.  In the morning the program was still chugging along.  I advanced the paper feed on the dot-matrix lineprinter -- the kind that used continuous feed paper with perforated edges and holes on each side.   Into view came 3 solutions represented by a string of numbers.   A quick check verified that I was now a genius.  

Now that Maple 15 is out, I thought I should share this little application I made: GoalTracker.mw. It is an application partially inspired by the BMI tracker in Nintendo's WiiFit application; you could easily use it to track a weight loss goal. But it could also be used to track other quantifiable goals. I am posting it here mostly because it takes advantage of two new features in Maple 15.

Each of my two previous two blog posts (Maple Gems, More Maple Gems) contained five "gems" from my Little Red Book of Maple Magic, a red ring-binder in which I record...

Back when I was working at the University of Waterloo, I found several copies of a VHS tape sitting on a dusty bookshelf full of old Maple boxes and manuals. The tape's cover had a line drawing of Issac Newton on it and the title "Maple V: The Future of Mathematics".

There was...

I had originally planned for a light-hearted post on a recent customer visit that I recently made in Europe but in light of the events in Japan these past few days, it somehow seemed terribly inappropriate. Around the world, people are coming to grips with this recent series of disasters, but for us at Maplesoft, being part of the global Cybernet corporate team, there are very personal dimensions.

The good news is that all of our colleagues at Cybernet Systems, headquartered...

In a recent blog post, I discussed five "gems" in my Little Red Book of Maple Magic, a notebook I use to keep track of the Maple wisdom I glean from interactions with the Maple programmers in the building. Here are five more such "gems" that appeared in a Tips & Techniques column in a recent issue of the ...

Update - April 4, 2011: I corrected a typo in Table 2, first column, bottom row.  What was sqrt(6) has been changed to sqrt(5).