Thursday, November 19, 2015

[cllaynyn] Four slashes in a square

Divide a square into four equal squares.  In each little square place a forward or backward diagonal slash, yielding 16 possible characters, an encoding of hexadecimal.

To be able to distinguish which slashes belong to which character in a series of characters next to each other, let the slashes that radiate from the center be drawn wedge shaped, like a windmill blade.  Inspired by cuneiform.  Draw the tangential slashes curved, quarter circles which can join to form half, three-quarter, or full circles.

Previously.  Using color seems a good way of avoiding needing to choose stroke thickness.  Is it always possible to color avoiding horizontal or vertical color boundaries?  Update: no, for example a 3/4 circle and 1 radial slash.  Though this could be colored with a gradient.

There are 6 distinct shapes not counting rotations (and no reduction omitting reflections also). One requires 3 colors, and the 3/4 circle is otherwise the only difficult case.

This can of course be generalized to 9 slashes and so forth.

No comments :