
What could you write down about a juggling pattern? (1993) - panic
http://www.juggling.org/help/siteswap/faq.html
======
allenknutson
FAQ writer here. I've got a video with demos
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38rf9FLhl-8&t=105s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38rf9FLhl-8&t=105s)
from a few years ago. AMA.

~~~
allenknutson
BTW I'm fairly sure I wrote the siteswap -> on-screen simulation, in 1988. In
Pascal. A few years later three of us wrote
[http://www.juggling.org/programs/java/MAGNUS/juggler.html](http://www.juggling.org/programs/java/MAGNUS/juggler.html)
in now-ancient Java, which did a ton more stuff.

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stephengillie
Taught myself to juggle grocery store bags while working at a grocery store.

It's a little like spinning plates. You hang a bag in the air, leave it for a
bit, and grab it before it hits the ground. Now interleave 3 of these:

Start:

\- Hang bag A with right hand.

\- Hang bag B with left hand.

\- Hang bag C with right hand and grab bag A with left hand.

Process:

\- Hang bag A with left hand and grab bag B with right hand.

\- Hang bag B with right hand and grab bag C with left hand.

\- Hang bag C with left hand and grab bag A with right hand.

\- Hang bag A with right hand and grab bag B with left hand.

\- Hang bag B with left hand and grab bag C with right hand.

\- Hang bag C with right hand and grab bag A with left hand.

End:

\- Grab bag B with right hand.

\- Grab bag C with left hand, while still holding bag A.

OR

\- Allow all bags to fall on floor, then collect them.

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mikehall314
Here is an entertaining video describing the same notation from Colin Wright.
Excellent speaker!

[https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0](https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0)

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kurthr
Hey, maybe we'll get one of the originators on here?

One interesting thing that happened when jugglers discovered siteswap was a
proliferation in new patterns as they discovered the full space of (hand
position independent) patterns. Some are more difficult to time/think than
they are to throw/catch.

For more history see the wiki...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap)

~~~
ColinWright
> _Hey, maybe we 'll get one of the originators on here?_

Hello

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sp332
The Juggler3D "screensaver"
[https://linux.die.net/man/6/juggler3d](https://linux.die.net/man/6/juggler3d)
can also be run manually with a pattern, and it will attempt to show a stick
figure juggling with that pattern.

~~~
sevensor
I first saw this through xscreensaver and was very impressed. At least as it's
packaged for Arch, xscreensaver brings in loads of weird, fun, mind-expanding
screensavers. It's always a surprise. I'm not sure if other distributions'
packages pull in the full set of screensavers by default, but I imagine you
can find them regardless.

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cryptolime
Hi wrote this article in a blog explaining the basics if you are interested
[http://www.mathisintheair.com/eng/2018/02/21/maths-and-
juggl...](http://www.mathisintheair.com/eng/2018/02/21/maths-and-juggling/)

~~~
dimovich
Thanks! That was very informative.

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jkh1
For more on site swap, read also B. Polster: The Mathematics of Juggling.
Springer, 2002. ([https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Juggling-Polster-
Burkard-...](https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Juggling-Polster-Burkard-
Paperback/dp/B00JYHVORI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1532520613&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Mathematics+of+Juggling))
and here is a review by @allenknutson (writer of the FAQ):
[https://www.ams.org/notices/200401/rev-
knutson.pdf](https://www.ams.org/notices/200401/rev-knutson.pdf)

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dtheodor
This website is unchanged from 1993 (the web archive first crawled it in
1997), yet it looks great in my 4K screen. I wouldn't be able to tell if it
was written yesterday or 20 years ago. Completely unlike the experience you
are getting from something like this
[http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes.com:80/)

~~~
wodenokoto
It doesn't look great on my screen and I need to turn on reader-mode (which
breaks the graphs) or zoom and scroll horizontally in order to read the
content

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mhb
Anthony Gatto, the greatest juggler alive:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609254)

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oceanghost
Is there an intersection between HNers and jugglers? I've been teaching myself
contact juggling for... quite some time. I picked it because it was so far out
of my comfort zone.

~~~
jmmease
I spent hours a day juggling for ~4 years in my mid teens (in my 30s now) and
got up to juggling 8 balls.

I find numbers juggling (say 5 or more) to be almost therapeutic. It requires
a reasonable amount of physical exertion, and it just pulls you into a flow
state. All of your mental and physical focus is concentrated on maintaining
this ephemeral pattern, and there's no room for anything else... until the
pattern falls apart :-)

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krallja
I like the finite state machine (directed graph) near the end. That means
there’s a regular expression that can encode it.

~~~
allenknutson
You might like some of the papers about random traversals of this graph, e.g.
[http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0302.5257](http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0302.5257)
and
[http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/1601.06391](http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/1601.06391)

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jamesrom
Do any online tools to validate and visualise siteswap notation exist?

~~~
jkh1
You just need your head :) Check
[http://www.siteswap.org/validate.html](http://www.siteswap.org/validate.html)
Otherwise, check the software section here:
[http://www.siteswap.org/](http://www.siteswap.org/)

