Squares in Squares | Hacker News

111 points by carlos-menezes 15 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 26 comments

| ebolyen 14 days ago | next [–] Very relevant comic:https://thejenkinscomic.wordpress.com/2024/12/01/brady-bunch...

| dmd 14 days ago | parent | next [–] See also https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...

| sestep 15 days ago | prev | next [–] The triangular table view is fascinating. It looks like the periodic table. I wonder if there are number-theoretic lemmas (or at least conjectures?) about what "family" the optimal packing for a given number falls into (like diamond, diagonal strip, two blobs, etc). I didn't see anything when skimming the survey paper linked at the bottom of the site, but I'm sure there's a lot more literature here.

| yzydserd 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Many squares in circles bests were found this month.https://erich-friedman.github.io/packing/squincir/

| fuzzythinker 13 days ago | parent | next [–] Page doesn't say, but I'm guessing with help from AI reply

| goodmythical 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Brief search reveals prior academic research related to sexual orientation and dating apps. Doesn't appear to have done anything in maths before.But then, why were they the first to issue the correct series of prompts to produce these results?This would lend credence to the efficacy of using LLMs as tools. If mathematicians in the packing field had used the tool before this liberal arts student, they'd have their names on the record page.reply

| gus_massa 15 days ago | prev | next [–] In case you want a challenge, 11 is the smaller that has a solution that has not been proven to be optimal.

| amne 14 days ago | prev | next [–] if, like me, you're a non-native english and speaker don't immediately understand what this is about: the page shows for each n what's the minimum s such that n squares with side of length 1 fit in a square with side of length s.what I'm curious about though is what a proof for something like this looks like. and why does it need a proof? not to mention the randomness of some of the ns. Math is most of the time beatiful and whenever I see something like n=11 I think "it looks wrong so it must be wrong" yet it has a proof.

| javier_e06 14 days ago | parent | next [–] Same here. Non native English speaker. The first rule is that inner squares are of size 1. Always.Yet, in each example the inner squares shrink. Uh?It know it was a convention to better show the arrangement, normalizing, yadda yadda.Yet, Uh?

| nuancebydefault 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] The total image size is scaled each time such that each solution takes up the same amount of space. It is easier to browse that way.

| charlesrice 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Do you want the graphs with 300 squares to be bigger than your screen, or do you want the graph with 1 square to be 30x30 px for no reason? They're just zoomed.

| zamadatix 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] That's what I mean, I can't imagine why anyone would argue the same thing of graphs in general so I'm curious what the difference makes it so they find it so odd in this specific case.reply

| bradley13 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Some of these are wild. You expect to see something systematic, but they have little gaps between oddly placed squares in the center.

| NooneAtAll3 14 days ago | prev | next [–] I love 130. "You thought I'm just a 2-wide strip? SIKE, here's 8-degree polynomial!"

| onedognight 14 days ago | parent | next [–] Unrelated squares in squares, I think the interjection is PSYCH.

| goodmythical 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Both appear to be in use, the author succesfully communicated what they intended to communicate, and the audience (you) succesfully recieved the communication.You've issued a distinction without a difference.reply

| xnx 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Awesome site. Slight peeve that arrangements with a prominent diagonal aren't all oriented in the same direction.

| razorbeamz 15 days ago | prev | next [–] Looks like Hiroshi Nagamochi did all the boring work.

| npodbielski 14 days ago | prev | next [–] Why 4 is trivial but 6 had to be proved?

| smrq 14 days ago | parent | next [–] The 4 packing takes up 100% of its square; it's trivially optimal. The 6 packing only takes up 2/3 of it, so it's not necessarily obvious that you can't do better.

| npodbielski 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] for me it is obvious. If I am reading s=3 as multiplier of side of smaller square to side of bigger square, which means that bigger square side is 3 times the side of smaller one, than it is obvious that it should be poossible to squeeze 9 small squares into bigger square. It is children puzzle after all. What is not obvious here?reply

| goodmythical 13 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Because it could be possible, as we just saw with 5, that by some rotation of some number of cubes, you could fit six unit cubes in to box smaller than area 9. Since we just saw the unusual result in 5, it is worth verifying.reply

| throawayonthe 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] i believe 4, 9, 16, 25 etc are just subdivisions of the unit square (they're perfect squares)but the text also says "For the $n ≤ 324$ not pictured, the trivial packing (with no tilted squares) is the best known packing." applying 'trivial' to numbers that aren't perfect squares so iunno

| zamadatix 14 days ago | root | parent | next [–] It's two different trivial things. For each, it's just the case which doesn't require doing anything special.One is trivial proofs, which are where 100% is covered. This doesn't really leave much to prove in terms of whether or not more area can be covered by a different layout.The other is trivial packings, the very simple type without any tilting or need of gaps between squares. Trivial packings are only sometimes optimal. Of optimal trivial packings, only some can be shown optimal with an aforementioned trivial proof.

| matthewfelgate 14 days ago | prev [–] Sometimes nature is beautiful and sometimes it isn't.

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