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The Aperiodic Table

60 pointsby jgrahamclast Friday at 6:23 PM24 commentsview on HN

Comments

sashank_1509today at 4:46 PM

Aside and maybe controversial:

If I didn’t know that the author used AI, then I would have liked this way more. But that is because I would assume the author did this on his own and that would feel like a cool quirky thing to do. I just don’t care for a cool quirky thing if an AI made it.

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nilirltoday at 2:40 PM

Even after reading the Wikipedia entry I couldn't intuit what Aperiodicity means.

Does it mean simply lack of pattern? But that doesn't seem to be the case, at least visually.

Just last month I wrote a post about how Mendeleev's real genius was in how we went looking for periodicity [0] and how that helped predict elements.

Does aperiodicity have any cool properties that help in specific domains?

[0] https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-e...

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pohltoday at 2:33 PM

Don't miss that you can click through to aperiodictable.com to see it live.

Also: when did everyone stop calling this quasiperiodic and start calling it aperiodic? I feel like the almost-but-not-quite translational symmetry was a useful distinction. Has it fallen out of favor?

pavel_lishintoday at 3:02 PM

This is very cool, but are the actual relationships between the elements represented as you drag the table around? Or does it just set the element in the "nearest neighbor" spot?

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oerstedtoday at 2:47 PM

I would have found an aperiodic monotile (single shape) a bit more satisfying.

https://momath.org/the-hat/

But the simplicity of the shapes in the Penrose tiling has its own charm. And the way it rearranges itself when scrolling around the tiling is awesome!

khhghuingtoday at 3:50 PM

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