3 ms·

Part of Greg Egan novel Diaspora takes place in a universe with 5 spatial dimensions.

• ConceptJunkie 7mo ago
  I'm still trying to wrap my head around the statement in the book (IIRC) that it takes 8 legs to be stable in 5 dimensions. I'd assumed it would be 6, but this is a layman's intuition. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong. Awesome book regardless.
• chronolitus 7mo ago
  Loved this book! Part of this project started from wanting to make 4D creatures and train them to walk with RL. One interesting fact I learned is that ants would probably have 8 legs in 4D. Why? Well, apparently ants have 6 legs because this allows tripod-gait, a simple leg movement that always keeps 3 stable points on the ground[1] In 4D, you'd need 4 points on the ground, hence tetra-pod gait (4+4 legs). You could of course do with less, I'd guess even as low as 1-2 if you have lots of muscles and good balance. [1] https://dugas.ch/4d_creatures/tripod_gait.html https://dugas.ch/4d_creatures/tripod_gait.html