BIT-101 Blog

We have a winner. Daniel Langh was the first one to get a solution to me. Here is it is:

And the source.

Just realized there’s a whole other class that goes with this. Here is its:

Line.as

A few others got solutions as well. Hope you had fun doing it.

This week’s subject is Malfatti Cirlces:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MalfattiCircles.html

They look something like this:

Basically, tangent circles, but each circle is also tangent to two sides of the given triangle.

The challenge would be to take the file below:

http://www.bit-101.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/malfatti_circles.fla

and fill in the drawMalfattiCircles() method with some code that will actually draw correct Malfatti Circles. Feel free to create additional helper functions as needed. The function will be called once in the beginning and then whenever any of the triangle points are drawn.

Again, the prize is a copy of Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! to the first person who sends in a correct solution (or convincing enough to make me believe it is correct).

For the non-Flash stuff:

http://keith.bit-101.com/

Three of these arrived today. Very impressive!

Here’s another one from MathWorld, the Butterfly Function. Non-interactive, but pretty.

[Just updated this one. Inadvertently left an enterFrame function in there that was redrawing it on each frame, killing the CPU. Sorry bout that.]

Source.

We have a winner! At 4:05 a.m., I received the following from Ryan Phelan, who will get a free copy of Foundation ActionScript Animation 3.0: Making Things Move!

And the source.

As you can see, a Soddy Circle is one of the two circles which are tangent to the other three tangent circles. The inner Soddy Circle is between the three, and the outer one surrounds the three if possible, or lies off to the side if necessary.

Ryan beat out Jason Fistner by about 21 minutes, and Anselm Bradford came in less than an hour later. All three were awesome and as far as I can tell are technically accurate and well coded. Ryan was just first. I’d show the rest, but a Soddy Circle is a Soddy Circle is a Soddy Circle.

I think I might do a little contest like this on a regular basis, as long as my supply of books holds up.

If you are ever a bit bored and looking for some cool material for some Flash Math Experimentation (surely there are one or two of you out there besides myself who do stuff like this), check out Wolfram Mathworld. Start browsing til you find something interesting and try to do it in Flash.

Tonight I wandered across the page on Tangent Circles and created the following piece:

Drag around by the inner circles. Any anatomical resemblance is a product of coincidence and your own imagination.

Source here.

Free copy of Foundation ActionScript 3.0: Making Things Move! to the first person who sends back the FLA altered to draw the inner and outer Soddy circles. Seriously. [Sorry, we have a winner. Contest closed.]

David Tudury is a guy who used to be on the Flash forums back in the day. I remember he did some crazy 3D stuff back before Papervision was even a dream. After a long hiatus, he is back with PseudoBiotic. Nice to see some old school Flash experimentation going on.

Well, at least my book is…

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! now available in Japanese!

I knew this was being worked on, but didn’t know it was out already.

Buy it here.

I’ll be over there next month. Hopefully I can find a copy (unless someone from Friends of ED can score me one beforehand).