om fuel

Alan Grimes alangrimes@starpower.net
Sun, 05 Mar 2000 23:41:05 -0800


om

For the last fifteen years I have been haunted by a question I had posed to my
kindergarden teacher. I remember this vividly. My question was "When I cut do
I have to follow the line exactly?" The problem facing me was that I was
dealing with a world where cuts didn't need nor often follow lines. The
problem with which I was challenged was to force the world of cuts to
perfectly match the world of lines. The teacher's response to my query was
"yes, ofcourse they do." But is that so? One looks at the road and sees that
Tens of millions of imperfect cuts along thousands of different lines in
sheetmetal all seem to travel just as well. To this point software has been
all lines, no cuts. With math it doesn't matter how you draw your numbers, or
letters for that matter, so long as they can be counted. But when *your*
machine sits down at the table and starts making cuts along lines how will it
see them? Will it crash at the first misstep? Will it see that if the fold
were made in deferance to the new cut that an acceptable result that a ship
can still be made. That is the line that needs to be crossed. The real
question is "Can lines be cut across as well as along?" And the answer is
"Certainly!" Now how the fuck do I do that with computer code?

om

-- 
The universe is only as big as you make it.

http://users.erols.com/alangrimes/