

The Batman Equation - meadhikari
http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/54506/is-this-batman-question-for-real

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alecco
The original submission at reddit had several interesting threads including
strings ready to paste in Mathematica and attempts to run it in WolframAlpha.

"Do you like Batman? Do you like math? My math teacher is REALLY cool"
[http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j2qjc/do_you_like_batm...](http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j2qjc/do_you_like_batman_do_you_like_math_my_math/)

It's shameful of HardOCP and others not to credit the original submitter.

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dlaw
I must admit that this strikes me as rather dull: make the equation
complicated enough and you can obtain any shape you'd like. I would far be
more impressed by a simple one-line equation that drew this shape.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
How long are your lines, how small is your font/letter-spacing .. du-duh! One
line!

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skrebbel
that first answer is basically pretty basic procedural graphics. There's a
whole scene of people using smartly combined simple functions to create pretty
and/or realistic shapes.

Check out 'cdak', a 4kb executable realtime animation for a rather impressive
example: <http://capped.tv/quite_orange-cdak> (video) or
ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/ized/prods/cdak.zip (4kb windows executable)

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iloveyouocean
I saw this posted on Reddit a few days ago. I briefly considered submitting it
here, but thought 'This kind of thing belongs on Reddit, not HN.' But what do
you know, here it is with 182 points. Oh well.

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iwwr
Is there a way to massage this so that Wolfram Alpha can graph it in whole?

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fedorabbit
once upon a time, I thought this is how computer generate graphic shapes...

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realou
The "batman" image and icons are under IP protection... I wonder if this
equation automatically falls under that umbrella. And what about the
particular result of that equation , when graphically rendered. Could I sell
T-shirts with that equation's rendering on them?

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smanek
Assuming copyright/trademark in place on the image, probably not (although,
IANAL - so take the following with an appropriate dose of salt).

The short reason why is that bits have color (
<http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23>).

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime> for a concrete example.

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jcsalterego
I was expecting:
[http://bp3.blogger.com/_snss6u0-WRI/RdzBKNfBTtI/AAAAAAAAAH4/...](http://bp3.blogger.com/_snss6u0-WRI/RdzBKNfBTtI/AAAAAAAAAH4/BFyaIf4WJvs/s1600-h/batman-
proton1.JPG)

~~~
alanfalcon
Huh, I was expecting something like this:
<http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1870>

Thankfully, this link wasn't quite as depressing as T-Rex's Expected Real Life
Batman Generation Rate.

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wisty
Note, there's even less cerebral things you can draw with polar co-ordinates.

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conradev
Heh, this reminds me of this:

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuppers_self-
referential_form...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuppers_self-
referential_formula)

~~~
onions
That trick always seemed incomplete to me because the output only contains
part of the formula; it's missing the constant that actually encodes most of
the information. Has anyone ever made one where the output contains everything
you need?

~~~
burgerbrain
If you consider outputs for equations other than Cartesian graphs, then Quines
should get you what you want.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quines>

~~~
onions
Yes, I think a "Cartesian" quine would be pretty tough to create, because
you're going from a symbolic representation to an inefficient visual
representation. Could a more efficient visual representation solve it? One
approach might be to output a bitmap that looks like this:

gunzip(########)

where ######## is a bitmap representation of the raw input to gunzip.

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BlackJack
I wonder what the equation would look like if a 3rd dimension was added.

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brianbreslin
How long before this is converted into css3 ?

