This is one of those things that probably means that I haven't gotten enough sleep.

So, I was in an icon view in a window and the icons didn't line up in a perfectly filled rectangle or square. But a quick drag of the corner and they were lined up (in a perfect square, actually). Then I started thinking, "Is there any number of items where no rectangle will fit perfectly? (aside from a straight line, of course)" A moment later I whack myself, "Duh, primes!"

So it's curious, although obvious, that a non-prime will form a nice rectangle where a prime won't. This makes prime vs non-prime very easy to see visually.

Of course, a normal computer algorithm is going to be faster than doing visual refactoring by changing the sides of a rectangle to see if the items fit. However, I got to wondering if this is the sort of thing that would be well suited to a chemical or biological algorithm given the distributed and physical nature of it. (e.g. "Can this clump of x things form itself into a filled rectangle?")

Hrm...

Posted by Shane on August 25, 2004 8:52 AM | Permalink