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Computational Origami and David Huffman
geeber writes "Here is an article about David Huffman's work in the mathematics of computational origami at the New York Times (soul sucking registration required). According to the article, computational origami, "also known as technical folding, or origami sekkei, draws on fields that include computational geometry, number theory, coding theory and linear algebra." David Huffman is also the inventor of Huffman coding used in MP3s and was mentioned prieviously here."
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Huffman coding was one of the first codings used to compress data LONG LONG time ago, in a galaxy far far away where MP3's were billions of years yet to come in the future.
It is real cool to see such pioneering people still involved in new things.
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as /. performs computational origami on the server and fold it into a crumpled half-finished paper swan on the floor
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Since he died in '99 he has become less involved.
Also, origami is not actually a new thing.
What Huffman was interested in was curved folds and stress points. Maybe it should be called Extreme Origami.
...is in Mark Nelson's "The Data Compression Book".
What's especially nice is that the book walks you thru the various steps - minimum redundancy coding, adaptive huffman coding, arithmetic coding... so the improvements are introduced gradually and logically. Good stuff.
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Check Amazon for the book mentioned in the article: Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods There are some related titles that also look good.
It seems to me that this is just taking another piece of art and removing the uniqueness of it. By taking Origami to a technical level is similar to looking at computer generated images instead of works of art. Granted, the ideas that are being calculated are still unique, but the look and feel may not be.
Aj
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There are also some nice pictures of Huffman's origami here. The pictures also show Huffman himself doing the folding.
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Click here for a Penguin not as hard as David Huffmans designs but ideal for your linux box
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For what it is worth, as the article submitter, I wrote in the submission a simple "(reg. required)." Apparently CmdrTaco thought "(soul sucking registration required)" was far more informative, and edited it thusly. Which really annoys the crap out of me. Way to be professional.
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If this interests you, be sure to check out Erik Demaine's work at MIT, Issei Yoshino's Super Complex Origami, HOYJO Takashi, Biruta Kresling's Keikki Bamboo folds, Robert Lang's Design Secrets of Origami, Robert Hull's Origami^3 compilation. Not all computational origami looks mathematical but the methods for getting to and end are clearly designed from step one. Quite frankly I understand very little of the math, but I can appreciate the elegance of an efficient fold.
I've always liked the idea of using origami for spacecraft. I can also envision universal constructor machines that convert asteroid materials into flat sheet and robotic systems that then fold long pieces of flat sheet stock into any shape that's needed (such as full size versions of these Star Wars spacecraft).
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[...] Huffman coding used in MP3s [...]
Why does everything have to be compared to MP3s? Why couldn't it have been 'Huffman coding used in ZIP files' or '[...] used by GZip' or '[...] used by the huffyuv lossless video codec' or any of about 5 million other applications that use huffman coding. Most of which are a lot more specific than MP3 which also uses a cocktail of other techniques to achieve compression and is, above all else, lossy, which huffman coding isn't.
To be transmitted across the Internet, this message was broken down into bits, like MP3s are.
Vry nfrmtv chptr n lssy cmprsn?
Thr shld b n 'n' n th wrd 'on'
John_Chalisque
I took a class taught by Professor Huffman at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He was an excellent teacher and really enjoyed teaching. The class, Introduction to Cybernetics, included Huffman coding and some basic neural network stuff, but never once did he call it Huffman Coding. One thing I remember from his class was we had to use a lot of logarithms and the results would have to be something like 5*log2(7) + log3(5). This ruled out using a calculator or a computer for the most part.
He also frequently gave credit to Claude Shannon on information coding.
Sadly (or fortunately) I avoided his other class, due to the fact that the failure rate was 60% for people taking the class for the second time. I think the first time takers failed at 90%.
-Aaron
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