
Ulam Spiral - theunamedguy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral
======
dokument
Three years ago I proposed using Ulam Spirals as the peering logic for
Bitmessage (decentralized, trustless messenger service). Essentially with
Bitmessage you trade messages with everyone on your network but you can be a
member of multiple networks. My proposal was to be in one network but peer
with with all the "touching" digit peers according to the Ulam Spiral. The
benefit of this approach is that newer (higher value) networks are peering
with older more established ones and there are multiple paths between non-
touching networks to send messages.

Here is the forum post with the suggestion:
[https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=2549.0](https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=2549.0)

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elcct
What has happened since then?

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graedus
Some nice images of a hexagonal version here, along with a python script to
create your own: [http://hexnet.org/content/hexagonal-number-
spirals](http://hexnet.org/content/hexagonal-number-spirals)

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eggy
Here is a YouTube video of a breakdown of manually exploring the Ulam Spiral
in the J programming language [1], and finally coding it up user tangentstorm.
[2]

After all, J is an array-processing beast!

[1] jsoftware.com [2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBC5vnwf6Zw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBC5vnwf6Zw)

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Razengan
As someone who occasionally contemplates upon the Origin of Everything
(something that I think every sapient being does at least once), looking at
the Ulam Spiral felt like there was a faint inspiration just waiting outside
the grasp of my understanding;

What if Reality came into existence simply out of mathematical truths and the
patterns arising from them?

That would require no First Cause.

And of course, there would be multiple ways to "see" those patterns, with our
universe being just one of those ways, just as the Ulam Spiral being a
specific 2D ordering of primes. I said "came into existence" but it may be
more accurate to say that all perceived existence is just one _interpretation_
or another, of fundamental truths.

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kr0
Wonderfully worded. I'd throw that to Bill Nye at big think on youtube at see
what he has to say. He loves "far out there" explanations for everything like
that

~~~
zaaakk
or he could ask an academically trained philosopher of mathematics and
probably receive a much more insightful response

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silveira
[https://github.com/silveira/ulam](https://github.com/silveira/ulam)

Here is a reusable implentation in Javascript using Html5 canvas. You can just
download the source, edit and run in your browser. Or see live examples here:
[http://silveiraneto.net/2013/05/14/twin-primes-visualized-
ov...](http://silveiraneto.net/2013/05/14/twin-primes-visualized-over-an-ulam-
spiral-in-html5/)

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some1else
I used it in one of the Pictur Bale pieces (Christian Bale vs. Mathematics
GIFs) [http://picbale.tumblr.com](http://picbale.tumblr.com)

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kordless
There's probably code in there, somewhere.

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dang
Previous discussions at
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ulam%20Spiral%20points%3E10&so...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ulam%20Spiral%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0).

