
Burning Man's Mathematical Underbelly - extarial
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/burning-mans-mathematical-underbelly/
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tibbon
> you can get everybody onto the same page by talking about the complex plane
> in terms of the layout of Black Rock City: the Man is at zero, Center Camp
> (Esplanade and 6:00) is at i, the main entrance is around - 2i, the 3:00 and
> 9:00 plazas are at ± 1, and the Temple (a nondenominational, pan-belief,
> transient, and intentionally flammable structure) is at + i.

While this is accurate, after seven years of attending Burning Man this is the
first time that I've heard anyone describe the city layout - even after
spending a pretty significant amount of time at self-identifying geek camps
like The Institute.

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bonniemuffin
Hm, I think there's a typo in the article: center camp would be at -i, not i.

Anyway, it seems a bit strange to me to use the burning man map (a polar
coordinate system) to describe a Cartesian-style grid like the complex plane.

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mkstowegnv
A nice article for someone who knows nothing about Burning Man. If you've
been, you will learn little that you don't already know. Burners choose to
play in a difficult, often uncomfortable environment. They have a higher than
average desire to be challenged - by everything from esoteric math and physics
discussions to learning (as novices) moderately advanced contradancing (a
radically inclusive danceform [1] that has been analyzed with matrices [2],
disclaimer - my camp).

1
[http://www.burningmancontradance.com/home/contraintro](http://www.burningmancontradance.com/home/contraintro)

2
[https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10166/679/4...](https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10166/679/422.pdf?sequence=1)

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elcinr
>They have a higher than average desire to be challenged

A lot of them also take a lot of MDMA and drink a lot of alcoholic beverages.
There's something for everyone at BM.

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lifthearth
Hangovers are hell in that environment. If you got to burning man for the free
drinks you're an idiot and won't come back. MDMA is fun to make a night of but
not the drug of choice out there.

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DrHuman
What's the drug of choice out there?

~~~
lifthearth
Sleep deprivation, bicycling, lots of water and downtempo electronica.

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QML
_We weren’t always so lucky. One year, before we’d even finished setting up
the booth, a cadre of MIT undergraduate physicists stumped us with ‘Soap
bubbles physically solve minimal surface problems. Are there any other
physical phenomena that quickly solve NP-type problems?’_

Anyone have more resources on this? I could only find a brief overview by
Scott Aaronson [1].

[1].
[https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf](https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf)

~~~
westoncb
The main thing I wonder about this is whether it's misleading to say the soap
bubble is 'solving' a problem of high computational complexity.

If we were to form a description of its state evolving, framed as a
computation, then that computation would be in such and such a complexity
class—sure. But if you want to go ahead and say that soap bubble is literally
computing in the same sense, you're making a number of implicit philosophical
commitments that I have yet to see a justification for when this subject is
brought up.

Edit: to clarify, what I'm getting at is whether we're _using it_ to solve
what is a problem for us, or whether it literally has to 'find a solution' in
order to get into the state it gets into, so that principles of computational
complexity etc. would be somehow applicable to what it's doing.

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guest2143
My grad school professor was at a bar with a consultant friend who was trying
to find the optimal wiring paths for routing expensive electric cables.

My professor asked for the change in his pocket: they went to the hardware
store and got plexiglass, dowel and drill. In the hotel room, the put together
a model of the points to connect between the plexiglass sides and dunked it in
the soapy hotel tub.

the pattern the soap bubbles formed was the shortest path between the
electrical tower model.

~~~
westoncb
Okay, that makes sense to me—we can set up the physical system's initial
conditions to mirror some problem we want solved, then let it do its thing and
grab the solution back afterward.

That definitely feels better justified than the view I had of it, though it
still has some weakness, I think.

From my understanding the justification for calling it computation comes down
to: we can use the physical system to solve a problem that we would ordinarily
approach computationally, therefore it must be computing too. Right?

~~~
stevenhuang
> From my understanding the justification for calling it computation comes
> down to: we can use the physical system to solve a problem that we would
> ordinarily approach computationally, therefore it must be computing too.
> Right?

To me, it feels like the intention of "computation" as used here is to give us
a convenient way to describe what the physical system _appears_ to be doing
(solving something the only way we know how--computationally) as opposed to
saying: the rules of our universe influenced these particles to act in such a
way that manifested in something interesting to us (an efficient solution to
some problem).

Very interesting to think then if we can leverage physical systems
(specifically non-quantum, to make that more interesting) to solve NP
problems.

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sevensor
I had to read the headline three times before it would parse correctly. Guess
I should have just clicked on the link. I read "Man's Mathematical Underbelly"
as the object of "Burning".

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pouta
Wow, what a great read. Thanks for sharing!

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bberenberg
I met Spencer in NY. Super cool guy, does really interesting research outside
of BM.

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edm0nd
1 drug + 2 drugs = 3 drugs

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api_or_ipa
I encourage you to think constructively how your commentary can further a
discussion which, by both the article and other comments, has proceeded well
beyond infantile jokes and worn-out stereotypes.

