Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/06/some-delightfully-sweet-valent.html
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I feel like I missed in the description why it’s called “The Whitman’s Algorithm.” It doesn’t seem to be an algorithm, it’s just how a grid works. “Two spaces to the left and one space up” is the same as “one space up and two spaces to the left.”
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This is pretty impressive if your true love is in middle school.
Just a fancy name for it, playing on the box of chocolates theme. Whitman’s is a brand of chocolate sampler boxes, and it’s following a set of directions to reach a pre-determined point on the grid.
If we want to be fancy, we could say the magic words “Z^2 is an abelian group”.
In my elementary school the label given to it was the commutative property of addition.
Well, in this case is not a matter of the property of addition, right? The moves are commutative on this surface, but we can imagine topologies where they are not commutative. So it must be a property of the surface, right?
I’m pretty sure there’s a time/space warp in there, as well as some quantum mechanical properties. Maybe some of those time crystals we’ve been hearing about recently.
This post is brought to you by Whitman’s. Boy, they’re tasty! Every kind of candy in a single box. They’re sure to please your wife or sweetheart. Now in the easy to open packaging. Be sure to ask your druggist for Whitman’s, the chocolate that’s swell!
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