4 ms·
Are you familiar with the construction of a torus by taking a square and "gluing the edges together"? It's effectively the game Astroids, where going off one ed
by xelxebar 8y ago
Are you familiar with the construction of a torus by taking a square and "gluing the edges together"? It's effectively the game Astroids, where going off one edge of the screen wraps around to the opposite edge.
If, instead, you twist the edges 180 degrees before gluing, we then get the Klein Bottle. I.e. when you warp from, say, the left edge to the right edge, you also get flipped vertically.
I'm guessing you're already familiar with that, but by a similar construction, we can start with a (hyper-)cube and glue faces together to get higher dimensional analogues.
To my knoweldge the easiest visualization of a non-orientable 3D manifold is just by thinking of a cube that warps around to the opposite face. However, in addition, it also reflects you into your mirror image. This is essentially a Klein bottle in one higher dimension.
It's then not too hard to start grappling with the 4D case and beyond!
- musgravepeter 8y agoI took that idea to its extreme and released "Geodesic Asteroids" on iOS (free) a couple of years ago. You can play on the 2D map or an embedded torus. There is also an old blog post I wrote at the time: http://nbodyphysics.com/blog/2015/03/06/asteroids-on-a-torus/ http://nbodyphysics.com/blog/2015/03/06/asteroids-on-a-torus...
- drilldrive 8y agoMaybe it would be interesting to have somewhat of a switch between the 2D map or the torus map, in that while playing 2D you can enter a challenge state where the map switches.
- xelxebar 8y agoOkay. That's pretty darn cool. I ended up trawling your blog a bit too. Really interesting stuff! Wish there were an RSS feed I could subscribe to!