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Breakthrough In Drawing Complex Venn Diagrams: Goes to 11

Posted by timothy on from the next-week-better-shopping-lists dept.

00_NOP writes "Venn diagrams are all the rage in this election year, but drawing comprehensible diagrams for anything more than 3 sets has proved to be very difficult. Until the breakthrough just announced by Khalegh Mamakani and Frank Ruskey of the University of Victoria in Canada, nobody had managed to draw a simple (no more than two lines crossing), symmetric Venn diagram for more than 7 sets (only primes will work). Now they have pushed that on to 11. And it's pretty too."

15 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Looks nice, but let's be honest by Lord+Lode · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Visually, you don't really get fast useful information out of it, it's too hard to map a certain part of it to exactly which 11 regions it contains...

    1. Re:Looks nice, but let's be honest by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This. They just found a clever way to jam too much information onscreen at once.

      Of course it's pretty -- Spirograph drawings are!

      This reminds me vaguely of Chernoff Faces, which were an attempt to give people viewing 4D or higher data a "feel" for it, since you can't really visualize 4D drawings. It takes advantage of brain circuitry for recognizing faces using many different little hard-wired things, like eye position, mouth width, and so on.

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      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  2. beautiful by gsgriffin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But useless

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    jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
  3. Misses the point... by Havenwar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The entire point of a venn diagram is a quick overview to easily be able to get an understanding about how things overlap, in what amounts and what areas. The diagrams on the linked page might be pretty, but they are in no way useful, and I doubt anyone would get more information out of it than reading the datalist it was compiled from.

    1. Re:Misses the point... by gmuslera · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is the limitation of the media and the limitation of the receiver. With the appropiate culture, you could see blondes, brunettes and redheads in falling letters.

    2. Re:Misses the point... by Asmor · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Venn diagrams do not show proportion (what I assume you mean by amounts)!

      If you draw a Venn diagram with a tiny little overlap, or a huge overlap, in order to make some point, [b]you are doing it wrong[/b].

      Now it's one thing to do this for comedic effect, but I see this all the time when people are trying to be serious and it makes me stabby.

      Venn diagrams are a way of visualizing overlaps in sets; the ONLY thing that matters is what region an element is placed, not how big that region is.

      A Venn diagram is a precise tool which displays particular information with no ambiguity, and trying to shoehorn proportions into it just makes it muddy. Plus, humans are fucking terrible at telling how much larger one roughly circular area is than another; make those areas slightly different shapes, and it's even less helpful.

    3. Re:Misses the point... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Simple Venn diagrams" are mathematical objects with certain properties. Constructing such an 11-Venn is an impressive feat and adds significantly to the body of mathematical knowledge surrounding these objects. This is an example of mathematical research.

      Taking an idea, extending it, and applying it to other things is what mathematicians do. They are not struggling to understand the purpose of the original definition; instead they are leaving those of you who do not have such capacity for abstract thinking behind. In this case, you are missing the point.

    4. Re:Misses the point... by Immerman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You've just run head on into the difference between targeted and foundational (or "blue-sky") research. Foundational research almost by definition has no particular application. Why do we care about the Higgs Boson? Why did we care about the electron? Or the neutron? No one had any concrete ideas for applications of any of them at the time - they were just trying to better understand the rules that govern the universe.

      Mathematics research is almost all blue-sky, but it's even more fundamental than physics since it the landscape is a construct of rigorous logic built on a foundation of a few of the simplest and most universally accepted rules, and the results apply to anything whose mathematical description can contorted into a compatible format, regardless of the original subject area.

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      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  4. Its art by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    At that level its just a shiny object with no substance.

    But then again, with what goes on in the political world these days perhaps it's appropriate.

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    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  5. Of course this is where it all began.. by wisebabo · · Score: 5, Funny

    (Classic SMBC cartoon)

    http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1917

  6. 3D? by mattr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    IANAM but would 3D help? Since now we have 3D printers one could build a program that would make a disassemblable colored object.

  7. Useless is in the eye of the beholder. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I agree that the 11-Venn is fairly useless as a PowerPoint slide, but Slash Dotters of all people should understand that pure mathematics often leads to applied mathematics. For example, suppose this new finding leads to improved approaches to signal multiplexing, so that you can have billions more 8G cell phones and thousands more channels of nothing-to-watch on cable and satellite TV. Or perhaps it will lead to more advanced neural networks, so that we can get Cyberdyne Systems and SkyNet up and running. Or maybe it will even lead to advances in political science that give rise to governments that are actually capable of serving the people they govern. One just never knows...

    1. Re:Useless is in the eye of the beholder. by guttentag · · Score: 4, Funny

      I agree that the 11-Venn is fairly useless as a PowerPoint slide...

      Are you inferring
      -(next slide)-
      that there are things which
      -(next slide)-
      are not
      -(next slide)-
      fairly useless as PowerPoint slides?
      -(next slide)-
      Many have claimed to invent such a thing, but none have succeeded.

  8. And it's not true - been done before by Bozovision · · Score: 5, Informative

    In 1989 Anthony Edwards figured out how to make Venn diagrams of arbitrary size: http://www.qandr.org/quentin/software/venn

    "Dr Edwards came up with an ingenious solution based on segmenting the surface of a sphere, beginning with the equator and the 0 and the +/- 90-degree meridians. It can be extended to an arbitrary number of sets by creating wobbly lines that cross the equator - starting with the pattern of stitching found on a tennis ball. You can unwrap the sphere back onto a plane and the sets still work."

  9. We don't know if it is useless yet by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Many seemingly pointless exercises in math lead to surprising breakthroughs. Graph partitioning is a very active area of research. Imagine creating an index on a ultra large database with pairwise "and" condition on many pairs of fields. Then finding multiple "and" or "or" condition based records within minimal traversing and merging of the index files. Who knows it might actually lead to dramatic speed ups of queries in large data bases.

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact