[HN Gopher] Geometry from Another Universe
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Geometry from Another Universe
 
Author : dgellow
Score  : 145 points
Date   : 2022-01-18 12:20 UTC (2 days ago)
 
web link (www.falsifian.org)
w3m dump (www.falsifian.org)
 
| zackmorris wrote:
| Does anyone know of a good visualization of a hypercube?
| Specifically, I'd like to be able to rotate it around various
| axes to see what its shadow looks like in 3D. On that note, a VR
| rendering might help since a 2D projection overcomplicates the
| shadow.
| 
| It's easy to construct, just build a point, extrude the point out
| to make a line, extrude the line out to make a square, extrude
| the square out to make a cube, then extrude the cube out to make
| a hypercube. It looks like two cubes with the corners connected
| by lines through a 4th dimension that we can't construct in 3D.
| 
| One way to visualize it is to use time, so if you translate a
| cube from point A to point B, the "extrusion" would be along time
| and you can kind of visualize that extra "dimension". But what
| would scaling, rotation, etc along that invisible axis look like?
| To fully grok it, we'd need to be able to sculpt the hypercube's
| shadow in 3D as easily as drawing a cube on a piece of paper.
| 
| Asking in the hopes of building a mental bridge to 4D and then
| possibly 5D in order to generalize to higher dimensions.
 
  | mariusor wrote:
  | 4D Toys from Marc Ten Bosch: https://4dtoys.com/
  | 
  | Based on the same 4D geometry concepts he's working on the game
  | Miegakure: https://miegakure.com/
 
  | ogogmad wrote:
  | You could use different projections, like gnomonic or
  | stereographic projection. There won't be any time dimension to
  | deal with, but it should make it easier to apply rotations and
  | see the effects.
 
  | JoeDaDude wrote:
  | I created a Hypercube screen saver back in the day from
  | instructions provided in a Scientific American article, which
  | if memory serves was written by Martin Gardner. A casual search
  | leads me to believe the article is in his book Mathematical
  | Carnival, though I could be wrong.
  | 
  | https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Carnival-Martin-Gardner/...
  | 
  | While you program it up, you can play this little Hypercube
  | game. Do it in 3D, then turn on the 4D to get an intuitive feel
  | for the 4D world.
  | 
  | http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/
 
  | enriquto wrote:
  | > rotate it around various axes
  | 
  | Wait, doesn't it rotate around a plane?
 
  | mikewave wrote:
  | Back in the day this Java applet by the famous Ken Perlin was
  | fun: https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/demox/Hyper.html
  | 
  | Recommendation: Your brain actually has two depth perception
  | systems: hardware (using your two eyes for parallax) and
  | software (using visual cues to establish a 3D scene, the way
  | you can with one eye, or when looking at 3d projections onto a
  | 2d surface).
  | 
  | Use each depth perception mechanism for a different axis! In
  | this old applet you could enable stereo projection and also
  | thick-lines-mode which really helped this, and gave me a strong
  | intuitive feeling for the motions of the hypercube.
 
  | corysama wrote:
  | https://apps.apple.com/de/app/the-fourth-dimension/id5042017...
  | 
  | https://www.theverge.com/2012/3/29/2912766/the-fourth-dimens...
 
  | p1mrx wrote:
  | Stella4D free demo:
  | https://www.software3d.com/Stella.php#stella4D
 
| ogogmad wrote:
| Very cool, but I have a question.
| 
| > _This is done using WebGL, an API for drawing 3D graphics in a
| browser. You might think it 's only designed to draw ordinary,
| Euclidean things, but it turns out it's perfectly suited to
| rendering this world as well. WebGL (and OpenGL) works with four-
| dimensional coordinates (x,y,z,w). Normally, you'll be advised to
| just set that w coordinate to 1 all the time. If you do that, the
| x, y and z coordinates will behave like ordinary 3-D geometry. I
| just ignored that rule and used the coordinates to represent
| points on the 3-sphere instead. It all works out. (You have to be
| a bit careful if you want to put textures on things without
| seeing seams between the triangles, but it can be done. The key
| is to make sure every flat surface is still a flat surface in
| 4-D.)_
| 
| Are the 4D coordinates treated as ratios, so that (w,x,y,z) =
| (tw, tx, ty, tz)? Because then that would express RP^3 instead of
| S^3, i.e. projective 3-space, instead of the 3-sphere.
| Equivalently, this produces a model of 3D elliptic geometry,
| instead of 3D spherical geometry. My doubts are because 3D
| computer graphics is known to use homogeneous coordinates, which
| results in a model of projective 3-space or elliptic 3-space.
| 
| S^3 can be coordinatised using elements of R^4 of unit length,
| which might have been done here.
 
  | Asooka wrote:
  | The w coordinate is there to aid the perspective transform and
  | translations. Because in homogeneous coordinates everything
  | becomes a matrix multiplication. At the end, before
  | rasterisation, the coordinates are normalised by dividing by w.
  | Yes, you can use it for whatever else you want, GPUs are just
  | vector processors, as long as you keep in mind how the
  | rasterisation step will happen.
 
    | ogogmad wrote:
    | Thanks. I'm aware of all those uses. But that strongly
    | suggests that he's constructed a simulation of projective /
    | elliptic 3-space, not spherical 3-space. The image on the
    | screen is a perspective projection thereof.
    | 
    | Additionally:
    | 
    | To clarify my understanding of projective vs elliptic
    | geometry, because I keep conflating them: Projective space is
    | a topological space, while elliptic space is projective space
    | endowed with a certain metric, turning it into a metric
    | space. Additionally, every elliptic isometry is a projective
    | symmetry, while the other way round isn't true. On a purely
    | topological level, there's no difference between elliptic
    | geometry and projective geometry.
 
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Would love to see this where you can toggle between a three-
| sphere, flat, and 3-hyperbolic space.
 
  | Jeff_Brown wrote:
  | And arbitraily gluable diffrrentiable manifolds!
 
| Jach wrote:
| I thought this might have been something about a Greg Egan book
| (https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html is a
| recent one with space-time composed of two dimensions of space
| and two of time), but these demos are really fun too. Especially
| like the connectedness of everything that's not in some sense
| cheated with portals.
 
  | all2 wrote:
  | Being able to set off a chain reaction in time 1 and then
  | inspect that chain reaction at various moments in time 2 would
  | be fascinating. Can you imagine a bullet hell in two dimensions
  | of time? Or even a physics puzzle game that operates in two
  | dimensions of time?
 
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I had a dream a year ago in which I was traveling at very high
| speed towards an edge of our universe. In the dream I entered a
| null space before entering the next universe in which all star
| systems obeyed solid state physics type laws: stars formed an
| outer lattice and planets in small lattices around stars.
| 
| After traveling through the second universe in my dream, I then
| entered a third universe that was more compact because space was
| curving back onto itself in a way that was not understandable but
| I kept looping back to where I was before. When I woke up I
| thought I was dreaming of a very high dimensional space where
| everything was happening in lower dimensional manifolds curving
| through that space where "all the action was."
| 
| Definitely one of my better dreams!
 
  | mekal wrote:
  | Have you read the Three-Body Problem trilogy? There's some
  | stuff in the third book (Death's End) that sounds a lot like
  | your dream. Specifically the different dimensions of space. If
  | your dream didn't come from that book, perhaps you should
  | consider writing some science fiction!
 
  | melissalobos wrote:
  | > everything was happening in lower dimensional manifolds
  | curving through that space where "all the action was."
  | 
  | I feel like this would have to be true in a very high
  | dimensional space, since an infinite dimensional orange is all
  | skin.
  | 
  | > systems obeyed solid state physics type laws: stars formed an
  | outer lattice and planets in small lattices around stars.
  | 
  | This sounds really fun, could you try explaining a bit more
  | about it?
  | 
  | Thanks for sharing.
 
    | mark_l_watson wrote:
    | Sort of like the manifold hypothesis in deep learning.
 
    | Jeff_Brown wrote:
    | > an infinite dimensional orange is all skin
    | 
    | Huh?
 
      | jerf wrote:
      | As you increase the dimensionality of a sphere, an ever-
      | increasing proportion of the sphere is within epsilon of
      | the surface.
      | 
      | This 3Blue1Brown video addresses enough related stuff that
      | the rest should become reasonably comprehensible:
      | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwAD6dRSVyI This particular
      | result is tossed in as a side note around 23:25, so it's
      | not addressed directly, but it'll help.
 
  | bckr wrote:
  | Thanks for sharing this. I love dreams like this. Flying, space
  | travel, and alternate physics are some of the most fun. This
  | actually makes me want to go to sleep and have a nice dream.
  | 
  | Does anyone know of any communities specifically for sharing
  | awesome dreams? DreamerNews?
 
  | bopbeepboop wrote:
 
  | ryandrake wrote:
  | Wow, if you're having these dreams without the aid of
  | substances, I envy you. The most intellectual dreams I seem to
  | be able to come up with "unenhanced" are falling off buildings
  | and being late to college exams while having no pants on.
 
    | all2 wrote:
    | My favorite are the dreams I have before a semester starts:
    | it is the end of the semester, and I've just discovered I've
    | forgotten about an entire class for most of the semester.
    | Then I wake up.
 
      | jerf wrote:
      | I'm in my 40s. For a good long while, my recurring school
      | dream was that my high school discovered that I didn't
      | actually finish correctly, and because that invalidates my
      | college degrees (in dream logic land), I can't do my job
      | until I go back and finish high school properly.
      | 
      | For some reason in the last six months to a year it has
      | shifted to the idea that I signed up for a full semester's
      | worth of courses, while still trying to work my full time
      | job, and I'm flunking all of them because I keep going to
      | work and never attending the classes or doing the homework.
      | 
      | Either way, coming up on nearly 20 years since I've been in
      | any kind of school and my subconscious is _still_ freaked
      | out about it, one way or another.
      | 
      | By contrast, my subconscious appears to not give a flip
      | about whether I'm doing my paying job correctly. Don't tell
      | my boss.
 
        | geodel wrote:
        | Wow, seeing so many comments high school/college exam
        | dreams do seem universal. I have had these dreams like
        | forever. To think about high school was almost 25 years
        | ago.
        | 
        | Another theme for me is not able to board on plane. More
        | than missing flight it is about being stuck to places
        | where I do not want to be.
 
      | robotnikman wrote:
      | For some reason this is a reoccurring dream for me as well,
      | and its been a few years since I've taken a class.
 
      | skc wrote:
      | My version is me running late for an exam and then
      | frantically searching for the exam room the entire time as
      | the clock ticks down.
      | 
      | The wave of relief and euphoria that overcomes me when I
      | wake up is literally spiritual.
 
      | selimthegrim wrote:
      | Had those about high school recently and I'm 35 and in grad
      | school.
 
      | ck45 wrote:
      | This is extremely common, I googled a lot about it some
      | years ago. I have it in two versions, the first one is that
      | I have to repeat a maths course in school, being aware
      | about the age difference with the other students, the other
      | one is missing a course in university and not having
      | graduated. The latter one feels so real that in the
      | beginning I had to remind myself about having been at the
      | graduation ceremony :)
 
        | throw10920 wrote:
        | I wonder why it's common? Easiest explanation would be
        | extreme stress/mild trauma from the stress of college...
 
        | mnadkvlb wrote:
        | holy crap, i had the 'missing a course' nightmare roughly
        | every 2 months for 2 years after graduating.
 
        | advantager wrote:
        | I've had variations on this dream several times. I was
        | talking to my father about it, and he _still_
        | occasionally dreams about this. As a 67 year old, 5 years
        | retired, 40 years after graduating...
 
      | unsui wrote:
      | I'm genuinely curious why this dream pattern seems to be
      | quite distributed across many people.
      | 
      | I still regularly have the dream where I realized after
      | graduation that I had missed an entire college class or
      | test (often varies depending on the specific dream), but
      | this then nullifies my graduation and all my subsequent
      | work.
      | 
      | Also over 20 years ago, but still a regular visitor to my
      | dreamscape.
      | 
      | Taking very liberal inspiration from the idea of something
      | like Jungian archetypes, more along the lines of there
      | being attractors in the informational dream-space that
      | create narrative clusters linked to common emotions (such
      | as anxiety), I can imagine of set of emotion-to-dream-
      | narrative mappings that would lead to some of the
      | regularities often seen in distributed recurring dreams:
      | 
      | - losing one's teeth - riding naked in the subway - being
      | late to a class or missing a class/test entirely etc.
      | 
      | Just wondering if there has been any research on this that
      | doesn't try to fall on the old standbys of Jungian
      | archetypes, collective unconscious, and other similar
      | handwaving
 
      | jvanderbot wrote:
      | I still have those dreams -- except now I _know_ they are
      | going to take away my degree, and thus job.
 
      | kelseyfrog wrote:
      | I have the same shared trauma response. Really does have me
      | thinking back to my school years and trying to grapple with
      | the two opposing feelings of "that was a lot of fun" and
      | "gosh, why is it still giving me nightmares?"
 
      | ballenf wrote:
      | My version of that dream has me unsure where the class
      | meets (I have a syllabus but can't decipher it somehow) and
      | not sure if I have the right textbook for the class. I keep
      | trying different classrooms but they all just allow me to
      | enter without a hint of whether I'm in the right one.
 
      | jonsen wrote:
      | As a student or teacher? I've had exactly this recurring
      | dream, forgetting to teach a class. What a nightmare when
      | they are not ready for the exam.
 
    | pumnikol wrote:
    | I actually had a similar type of dreams as mark_l_watson when
    | I took quantum chemistry (that's not a drug... for most
    | people). Since I switched to performing more mundane tasks
    | for a living, my dreams shifted to me hopelessly trying to
    | navigate the very real, although warped and endlessly
    | labyrinthine, dim interior landscapes of my university's
    | library which I last visited more than 10 years ago. It was
    | built around 1970 and it is a kind of trip during waking
    | hours already.
 
| thealig wrote:
| reminds me of the demonstration of hyperbolic geometry in VR by
| Henry Segerman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztsi0CLxmjw).
| there is a browser demo too where you can 'fly' through the small
| world (http://h3.hypernom.com/)
 
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| If you're interested in this, you may be interested in
| Hyperbolica, which is a whole game about this concept:
| 
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1256230/Hyperbolica/
| 
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMKLeS-Uq_8
 
  | ranger207 wrote:
  | And HyperRogue
  | 
  | http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/
 
  | CyberShadow wrote:
  | Specifically, the video about spherical geometry:
  | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9GAyJtuJ0
 
  | jerf wrote:
  | Hyperbolica is _mostly_ about the opposite, a hyperbolic
  | universe, but there may be some section to the game that will
  | be in a spherical universe. There 's definitely some devlog
  | video set in a spherical universe:
  | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9GAyJtuJ0 The end of the
  | video suggests this will be in the final game, at least as the
  | time that video's creation.
  | 
  | In the meantime, the video I link is basically a video
  | exploration of spherical geometry. One of the better ones, in
  | my opinion, because it has "normal" objects in it, rather than
  | floating heads or a ton of Earths or something.
  | 
  | (Another amusing sidebar: As you can see in the video above, an
  | inhabitant of that space would be naturally inclined to say the
  | space curves in above them. It would take an Einstein to assert
  | that it's actually flat, and Spherical Einstein would have a
  | very hard time describing "flat" to anyone. You can only make
  | things "flat" contingent on the observer being in a very
  | particular place. If you look at the next devlog:
  | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXWRYpdYc7Q back in Hyperbolic
  | space, you can also see that a resident of that space would
  | naturally believe the space they are in is a sphere (albeit one
  | of variable radius, which is weird, but still, you can look out
  | in the world and _see_ the curvature, obviously it 's round),
  | and it would again take an Einstein to say that it is flat.
  | It's flat if you are _exactly_ on the ground, but hyperbolic
  | space exaggerates any degree to which you are above the ground
  | to make the horizon look round.)
 
  | jlpom wrote:
  | Antichamber too
  | https://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/Antichamber/
 
  | JoeDaDude wrote:
  | 'Nother 4Dgame. An old classic, just get the ball out of the
  | (hyper)cube.
  | 
  | http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/
 
  | echelon wrote:
  | These are great!
  | 
  | (There's also miegakure:
  | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWsBnVtl8tA )
  | 
  | I can't wait for these games to start being built for VR. Maybe
  | it'll be possible to develop a sense for higher dimensionality
  | intuitively using our senses.
  | 
  | Maybe young mathematicians and physicists can explore higher
  | dimensions in VR to get accustomed to it, which might help with
  | their theorizing and explorations.
 
    | kroltan wrote:
    | Hyperbolica is to have VR support too, the creator discussed
    | [0] how he had to use a specific technique to ensure the
    | rendering was compatible with VR optimizations.
    | 
    | [0]: https://youtu.be/rBr-0bHQfxc?t=357
 
    | asxd wrote:
    | Looks like 4D toys is VR-supported:
    | https://store.steampowered.com/app/619210/4D_Toys/
 
| maupin wrote:
| Reminds me when I was trying to model a 3D space and my math was
| off.
 
| rezmason wrote:
| This is cool!
| 
| I wonder why the viewport is only a 300px square.
 
| hwers wrote:
| No css plaintext blogs is such a statement and cool signalling,
| love it.
 
| amelius wrote:
| Judging from the image: straight lines map to straight lines?
 
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