

The quest for every beard type - aycangulez
http://www.dyers.org/blog/beards/beard-types/

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TamDenholm
Sadly i'm one of these guys: <http://i.imgur.com/0xdmt.jpg>

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rufugee
Ah yes...I've had this cycle going consistently for years. I'm currently in
the perseverance phase...again...

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shrikant
Ordered by trustworthiness: <http://i.imgur.com/PHmF5.jpg>

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bravura
I've always said that with great power comes great responsibility.

Most people, if they were capable of growing these amazing moustaches, they
would already be dictator of a small nation.

Not Jonathan E. Dyer. No, this man uses his beard growing skills for the
_benefit of science_ and humanity at large.

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rue
This man can really grow a beard, well done!

Most men only have one or two styles they could pull off and unfortunately it
takes a while to find the right one…I suspect that's a big reason why many
won't even try. A light beard isn't usually too great, either, but you can
always dye it and use an eyebrow pen to retouch inbetween treatments.

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biot
I suspect the trick is to grow a big unruly beard and then plan how you're
going to cut it. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get almost a dozen
styles out of one beard simply by trimming a little, taking a picture, then
trimming a little more until you get to the next style, and so on until the
last picture might be the soul patch. With enough planning (and the right
genetics) you could do all of his styles in 2011.

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bdr
There are a couple interesting math problems in there.

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ZoFreX
It seems like there are a number of states (beards), with transitions only
being possible between some of those states. Map that all out and it's a graph
theory problem - how many can you visit in one go?

We can transform it into a more classic problem (visit every single node) by
adding more edges with weights, where the weight is how long it would take to
grow enough beard to make an otherwise invalid transition.

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bdr
What's the minimal number of such beard-paths required to cover the beard-
graph, and what's the best algorithm to construct such a cover? Now, suppose
we weight each beard-vertex by how long it takes to grow -- what's the least-
weight beard-path cover, where the weight of a beard-path is determined by the
maximum-weight (starting) beard-vertex?

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ZoFreX
Well you can get from any beard to any other with time and a trim, so the
graph would be complete, and thus have n(n-1)/2 edges. As for constructing the
cover, I guess you could divide the face into the relevant areas (sideburns,
lower sideburns, cheek, center chin, edge chin, middle moustache, edge
moustache, moustache to chin connectors, etc) and note how long each section
is for a given beard style. Given the rate of hair growth (or if it's non-
linear, an equation for the time to get from one length to another), you can
then work out how much growth (if any) is required to get from one style to
another.

I'm confident the graph construction can be done in poly time (O(n^2) edges),
solving it is harder obviously! However, if this work is correct, we have a
polytime reduction to TSP, thus showing that the "beard problem" is NP-
complete.

Edit: Crap, that's the wrong way round to show NP completeness isn't it? You'd
have to show that, given a TSP problem you can reformulate it as a beard
problem. I'm not sure if a beard problem necessarily exists for every TSP
problem, I'll think on it...

Update: Ok, the first part is to make sure we can represent all the nodes /
edges, and we can. We just need to increase the number of segments (areas of
hair growth we are concerned with) to match the number of nodes. If we have
three nodes, A, B, C, then we need three areas corresponding to them. For a
given node, we set the area corresponding to it to the maximum distance
between that node and other nodes. Once this is done, we set the other areas
so that the distance, in hair growth, from each node to the others matches the
graph. This then works.

However, this only works for a complete graph. I can't think of a way to
easily resolve that, i.e. make it not permissable to get from some nodes to
others without going via intermediaries... You could make it so going from one
beard style to another means you will have a third along the way, but it seems
non-trivial to enforce that.

So, we can reduce TSP on a complete graph to a beard problem. I think we can
maybe convert a non-complete TSP to a complete one by adding arbitrarily heavy
edges? However, this would necessitate extremely long beards, perhaps
impossibly long. Thoughts?

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bdr
I was imagining a simpler model, where different areas of the beard are either
present or not; length doesn't matter. If you're growing one part out, you
might as well grow all of it out. Therefore, in this model, you only "grow" to
the full beard vertex.

I'm not sure that your reduction from TSP works. Given two nodes A and B, I
understand that you're setting their distance on the associated facial areas
to match the distance in TSP, but what if they're forced to be even more
distant on the area corresponding to some other node C?

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ZoFreX
I think you're correct, I found other problems in my reduction too.

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smogzer
Smogzer's method for "How to see yourself in every beard type" :

1) Grow a huge beard. 2) Put yourself in a comfortable and repeatable pose,
i.e. fixate a point in space, shoulders back, make sure you are able to repeat
the position you are in. 3) pick 1-5 camera poses around you. 4) with your
huge beard take pictures from every camera position in various lighting
settings, or have a friend do it. 5) shave, standing in place if it has to. 6)
take pictures again. 7) with photoshop or gimp overlay the beard picture on
top of the beardless one and delete and clone parts of your beard ! 8) since
this is hacker news, the post would not be complete if you do not: 8.1) create
a startup from it ;)

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smogzer
Also check the article "image based shaving" for an algorithm for beard
removal: <http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/imageshaving/>

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nhebb
I'd love to grow all these beards, but unfortunately I have the facial-hair-
growing capability of Ethan Hawke (except I had enough sense to give it up
when it didn't pan out).

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CWIZO
Yeah ... it saddens me that the only thing I could muster is the "The Pencil",
and even that would look funny on me. Oh well, at 24 I guess it's time I
accept that I won't be able to grow a beard :)

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pmjordan
My facial hair is somewhat denser now at 26 than it was when I was 24. No idea
how common this is, though.

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kadavy
Grow a beard. It will change your life.

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jkaufman
My friends and I did a "Beard-tober" a year ago -- no shaving for the entire
month of October. It didn't change my life - I just looked like a guy with a
light colored and somewhat patchy beard.

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NIL8
Try growing one for a minimum of six months. It takes dedication and courage.
At the very least, it's a great social experiment. You'll encounter prejudice,
admiration, and endless hours of fun like the guy in the link!

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sophacles
Also noteworthy: the type of girls I meet when bearded are of a very different
type than the type I meet when not bearded. (not better or worse, just a whole
different experience) Particularly when I keep my beard tuned to "vaguely
edgy".

Of course you'll have to learn to put up with lots of looks of disapproval,
and old ladies holding their purses tighter around you, but that is worth it
in its own right too.

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Groxx
I do believe this qualifies for "epic". Amazing spread. And awesome job on the
"Federation Standard", I got a _huge_ Star Trek vibe immediately.

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itg
Don't forget this one <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=081dHOYY6IE>

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wyclif
Curious: how old is this? I hate it when there's no date on blog posts.

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blhack
There is a date under every post, and he updates it every time he gets a new
beard.

