Robert Munafo (mrob27@gmail.com) writes:
Here are two things I have been working on.
Both sound great! Here's something that I fantasize about in a similar vein: I picture a big touch-sensitive panel, five feet wide and stretching up to the ceiling. In one mode, it runs a big simulation of Life, and you can pause the action, toggle the states of specific bits with your fingers (perhaps referring to a nearby card that lists common fun configurations to insert into the Life universe), and then re-start the simulation to see what happens. In another mode, the panel runs a 1-D cellular automaton, drifting up the screen as it evolves. The way the panel disappears into the ceiling is integral to the "wow" effect I'd want to achieve. A big touch-sensitive wall might have other cool uses. For instance, I have a great app on my iPhone that lets me zoom in on the Mandelbrot set and various associated Julia sets, using the wonderful two-finger expand/contract gesture. (It almost makes me fancy that the iPhone was invented by someone who wanted to explore the Mandelbrot set in this very tactile way, and decided to invent a PDA that would let him do it!) It'd be good to have a user-controlled way to zoom in the Koch snowflake curve and the Weierstrass function and Bolzano's function (the first example of an everywhere-continuous, nowhere-differentiable function). Jim Propp