10 ms·
Tallest Lego building with 4 pieces?
- zachrose 9y agoGain an extra 2mm or so by just resting the pink piece on top?
- lorenzosnap 9y agoyou are right. I will do it and then take another photo
- 542458 9y agoI think you can do ever so slightly better by moving the pink dot to the highest pip on the 2x2 green cylinder - it extends a little beyond the pip, so you'd gain about a millimeter that way. If it's not cheating to have parts not completely attached, you could maybe even balance the pink dot on top of the green cylinder for an extra 3-4mm.
- fiftyacorn 9y agoif you dont have to be attached then place it under the blue brick
- anotheryou 9y agoeasier to balance on top, but I think it's not a "building" any more than.
- milkytron 9y agoMaybe not a building, but still a structure ;)
- sjrd 9y agoI had exactly those two ideas, even before looking at the solution proposed in the article :)
- paulcole 9y agoCongrats to Evan Williams on the success of Medium.
- frogfuzion 9y agoWhat does this have to do with the post.
- ShabbosGoy 9y agoAbsolutely nothing. It takes a really hardened individual to completely ignore the beauty of a father spending time with his daughter and building things with her in order to talk shit about Evan Williams and Medium.
- Geee 9y agoIf this story was on an ugly Wordpress site, no one would upvote it.
- trevyn 9y ago>The only rule is “The structure needs to stand on its own.” Melt it down and recast it, duh. :)
- AckSyn 9y agoYou must be an engineer!
- runarberg 9y agoI think that is cheating, because after the recasting is done you are left with a single piece. The instructions clearly say 4 pieces ;)
- presidentender 9y agoRecast the individual pieces, then.
- 5ilv3r 9y agoPeople like you ruin rubix cubes. :p
- mturmon 9y agoIt might be interesting to compare the height achieved by a given configuration, to the upper bound on heights (sum over largest dimension of all 4 pieces).
- btbuildem 9y agoYou can do a bit better if you put the round piece at the base, and make the blue piece diagonal just like the big flat piece. You'd need to balance everything on the round piece, but the little pink dot should assist in that. Kind of like those balanced rocks thing :)
- martin-adams 9y agoyep, that was along the same line of thought I had
- jacquesm 9y agoAh, jacquesm bait, ok here is my solution (left), right one is an alternative to yours. http://imgur.com/a/h7HnB http://imgur.com/a/h7HnB just the tops: http://imgur.com/a/wsqCw http://imgur.com/a/wsqCw
- lorenzosnap 9y agoLOL. Can't wait to show those pictures to my daughter. thanks
- jacquesm 9y agoYou're welcome :) That's a nasty trick though but it is actually designed to be used that way, Lego has all kinds of interesting tricks. Come to think of it this is an interesting game in the making, much better than most (or even all) games that lego makes: Given x pieces from some set you get to take turns trying to make the highest combination, or, alternatively, all kids at a party are handed the same lego pieces and the winner gets some prize.
- spydum 9y agoI feel like they should be attached and not stacked? https://imgur.com/gallery/W13nR https://imgur.com/gallery/W13nR Fwiw: 10.3cm
- spydum 9y agohttps://i.imgur.com/zUl5AP8.jpg https://i.imgur.com/zUl5AP8.jpg Measured 10.7cm: https://i.imgur.com/I637r2v.jpg https://i.imgur.com/I637r2v.jpg What have you done to me!? Can't stop.
- BatFastard 9y agoI never considered that the backplane is the same height as the inter dot distance. I thing I can think of as a possible improvement would be to put the single dot side ways, and put a grain of salt on each side. Or find a very slight indentation to put it in.
- asketak 9y agoDoes this content really belong to hackernews?
- giarc 9y agoEvery post starts out at 0. The community decides who to upvote and downvote. So does it deserve to be on hackernews? Hackernews users decided it does.
- jacquesm 9y agoIt does, but anonymous accounts questioning what belongs on HN and what does not do not.
- JCharante 9y agoThe users who make up hackernews have voted. It do.
- awqrre 9y agomoderators sometimes manually take down up-voted stories...
- dang 9y agoYour comment got treated rather harshly, so let me try to explain. The post is on topic for HN because, although the question is a whimsical one, it gratifies intellectual curiosity (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Whimsical submissions like it have always been welcome here, as long as they're uncorrelated with anything that's appeared recently. (Sometimes people start doing the copycat thing of posting follow-up stories on almost the same topic. Those get old quickly unless they're really interesting, so the bar gets higher superlinearly.) It isn't just a question of the community upvoting it. Plenty of stories get plenty of upvotes yet still don't belong on HN—e.g. most sensational controversies. Many HN users value the diversity of the stories that appear here and don't take well to comments that appear to want to narrow the site down. That might be why your question got flamed.
- jacquesm 9y agoOk, an even better one: http://imgur.com/a/FXhbH http://imgur.com/a/FXhbH
- ErikHuisman 9y agonow do one with the top piece upside down (or put that piece on the bottom)
- jacquesm 9y agoI tried, it will not balance (nor at the bottom, because COG is off-center too far from the center of the round 1x1 plate for it to be able to stand on its own). I'd love for someone to beat this one.
- ythn 9y agoYou could make the one on the left even taller by tilting the yellow rectangle so it also utilizes the hypotenuse
- gene-h 9y agoReminds of a genetic algorithm that was made to optimize lego structures[0]. One of the most notable results of this was optimizing for a structure as long as possible with a single support. What they got was a 2 meter long organic looking cantilever that experienced significant brick deformation[1] [0]http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/pr/buildable/evocad/aid00/ http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/pr/buildable/evocad/aid00/ [1]http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/pr/buildable/long_bridge/ http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/pr/buildable/long_bridge/
- gerdesj 9y agoOne commentator here questioned why is this on HN (and was DVd somewhat) There is the fact that dad teaches stuff to daughter. The lesson is fun and interactive. The concepts dealt with are pretty profound and can be quite deep: constraints, maxima and minima. Well done dad - you've covered some complex stuff in a fun and accessible way. Good skills. If anyone else doubts why this is valid Hacker News, they may want to simply hand in their nerd card and do something else.
- falsedan 9y agoSlamming my nerd card down so hard the whole table spins around It's hacker news, not motivational team building shared insight news. I'd expect a GA solver which selected the four pieces which could be constructed into the tallest possible structure (with all the dirty tricks e.g. a boat hull attached to a wobbly assemblage of Giant Base/wing plates with a 12x24 brick balanced on the top), with a Speculation section positing possible future pieces which would allow an even taller structure (with plausible details of the sets & why they would need even longer pieces than those currently available).
- gazarullz 9y agoVery cool post, in regards to the people clicking on the link and then bashing the author, it would be nice if you could bring some arguments to your disliking/bashing.
- 5ilv3r 9y agoAsking questions, challenging assumptions, bending the rules, and just trying things are all core to the hacker mentality. Well done sir!
- rena-anju 9y ago"My daughter asked me"
- xupybd 9y agoI have no idea why this post is so popular. I'm equally confused at why I find it so interesting.
- crazygringo 9y agoIt's funny, but I feel like this is exactly the kind of skill required in engineering or business generally -- "How can we creatively maximize 'x' given what we've got?" In fact, it wouldn't strike me as an unreasonable interview question, using the physical pieces. Of course some people are better with spatial reasoning than others (and experience with Legos is another leg up) -- but using several simple, general-purpose questions along these lines almost feels like a FizzBuzz for any job where problem-solving is an important part.
- jacquesm 9y agoThere's this joke about an Ikea job interview: interviewer tosses a bunch of parts on the floor in the interview room and says: take a chair.
- te_platt 9y agoVery fun! It reminds me of teaching my son to play tic-tac-toe. He started in the top-left, I went center, he went top-center, I blocked top-right, he went in between top-left and top-center and quickly claimed victory. I gave him that one and said he had to go in an unused square. Next game he started top-left, I went center, he went top-center and then before I could go he hurried and went top-right and again claimed victory. I don't remember what we did after that but I do remember thinking it was more fun pushing the rules than the actual game.
- jacquesm 9y agoChildrens logic: if it isn't said outright before the game then it isn't a rule. You lost fair & square.
- tdy721 9y agoTo entertain myself, I gave this some thought before I clicked. I assumed exactly what the title says: which 4 lego pieces create the tallest structure that stands on it's own. Well, we need the biggest bricks we can find, my mind went to the ship hulls: https://www.ebay.com/p/?iid=282223262072&&&dispItem=1&chn=ps https://www.ebay.com/p/?iid=282223262072&&&dispItem=1&chn=ps So how can we connect 2 of these together, and make it stand vertical? Or can we? It might be that we need the 3 pieces to make the brick stand... I'm not sure. And then I clicked on the article... (I'm not sure if I've even found the largest brick, or if I've found a 3 brick component; how do we define "brick"? Why do I care? Please comment and subscribe, it really helps ;)
- FireBeyond 9y agoYou could do a tall 1x1 block on the Stern and then attach something as a base, and then an arch attached to the bow (https://www.toysperiod.com/img/cache/67/800x600/d4e4o5g414l436v5o2x5o2q274o2v2y2645324m4v5e4r2b4x2u2x333t2w2.jpg https://www.toysperiod.com/img/cache/67/800x600/d4e4o5g414l4...) Or three arches, two at the Stern for a base.
- tdy721 9y agoI need to add, I clicked on the article, and totally enjoyed the content. (With a small caveat, noted above.) Envy, I think that's the word for the weird vitriol in this thread.
- the_unknown 9y agoThank you. I've now had a similar discussion with my two girls (Aged 11 and 4). Was a far better way to spend the evening than a typical night of Netflix.
- natch 9y ago10.9cm free standing, no glue or tricks but top two bricks are just resting, not attached. https://imgur.com/gallery/FEk9l https://imgur.com/gallery/FEk9l
- jacquesm 9y ago2mm below the tallest, but how earth do you get the pink piece to balance on the gray piece? I bow to the master.
- natch 9y agoThere is a taller one? Do tell! Link? Edit: and as to how to get the pink one to stay, it was just some delicate balancing. And the pink one is tilted slightly toward the viewer/left, in other words aside from being (obviously) oriented diagonally, it's also not oriented straight up and down in the other axis. Managed to do it a few times for different attempts, as the first time the pip wasn't riding as high as it could be. The pip just stays on (barely) by friction, btw.
- jacquesm 9y agohttp://imgur.com/a/FXhbH http://imgur.com/a/FXhbH That one is 11.1 by my tape measure. You could put them side-by-side. Still amazed you got that to balance. I tried it (after seeing your picture) but gave up :)
- Markoff 9y agokudos to Lego marketing department for great viral
- falsedan 9y agoLEGO Group marketing is on another level.
- aaron695 9y agoSorry but isn't two or three cheating? These are not valid ways to connect Lego are they?
- deluvas 9y agoYeah, that's what I thought too.
- RugnirViking 9y agohttp://guide.lugnet.com/set/?q=420_1&v=z http://guide.lugnet.com/set/?q=420_1&v=z I think this is an example of a very early set using this technique. But yes, this is possible and holds rigidly