Re: [math-fun] Ambiguously placed cities
Ed writes: << Refering to http://www.mathpuzzle.com/AmbiguousTowns.gif . . . Between four towns are roads of length 3, 5, 6, 7, ~3.10, ~5.44 . There are two distinct town configurations. (See picture in link) Q1. Are there 6 integer road lengths that lead to distinct town configurations? Q2. Are there 10 road lengths that lead to distinct town configurations?
Q1. Draw a non-isosceles triangle ABC with rational sides. Let M be the midpoint of AB, and let DD' be a segment drawn through M that's perpendicular to CM, such that the distances d(D,M) and d(D',M) are equal and rational. This implies distinct town configurations A,B,C,D and A,B,C,D' having the same sest of 6 distances. By scaling everything up by the product of all 6 denominators, the distances also become integral. Q2. Given an answer to Q1, add a 5th town on the perpendicular bisector of the segment DD', and far away from the other 4. This guarantees 10 road lengths with two distinct town configurations. It's unclear to me if this can be done with all distances integral. (Apropos this last comment, it's an unsolved problem whether there is a point in the plane at integral distances from all 4 vertices of an NxN square, for any integer N.) --Dan
Okay, I think I have one. The six integer distances are {1449, 2706, 2775, 4097, 5402, 6253}. More constructively, consider the isosceles triangle ABC, A=(0,0), B=(2640, 594), and C=(4680, 4147), with edge lengths {2706, 4097, 6253}. Then the points D1=(0, 1449) and D2=(2640, -855) are both at distances {1449, 2775, 5402} from ABC's vertices. Yes, the fact that all points invovled have integer coordinates is indeed a result of how I found it. I'll describe my search below, but it's kind of boring, so let me first point out that (a) there's no reason to believe that this is the minimal possible solution, and (b) I still want to know whether there's a solution that doesn't preserve a triangle (which my search technique could never find). I tried a search based on a geometric construction that I at first thought was the one Dan suggested last weeked, but rereading I realized it's not. Oh, but it is one half of Bill Thurston's method that gives triply-planar distance sets. Consider a triangle PQR. Let M be the midpoint of QR, and let L be the line though M perpendicular to the median PM. Then any point S on L is the fourth point (along with P,Q,R) of an ambiguous set, because P can be replaced by its reflection through M. So of course you start with an integer-sided triangle, but the distance d(Q,S) is unsurprisingly ugly-- it involves nested square roots, where the inner one is the square root of the altitude from R to PQ. Aha, says I: what if we restrict our search to cases where that altitude is also an integer? Which is to say, suppose our original triangle PQR was made out of two Pythagorean triangles glued together along a common leg. We can then keep pushing our luck, and demand that PQS likewise be made of two Pythagoreans, glued along the altitude from S to PQ. This is a space of configurations amenable to dumb computer search. It's easy to list all Pythagorean triples containing a given leg (of which there are only finitely many, of course). Gluing distinct pairs, it's easy to list all integer-sided triangles with given integer altitude (um, "height", I guess I should say). Now search over all pairs of heights (r,s) for two such glued triangles with those heights and the same base PQ. Put them on top of each other in all possible ways, and test for two things: a) The median PM is perpendicular to SM (distance-ambiguous), b) The one unconstrained distance, d(R,S), is an integer. Of course d(R,S) is already the square root of an integer. Configurations satisfying (a) -- which give rise to ambiguous sets of six distances, at least 5 integral -- aren't too hard to come by. The first one, with max(r,s)=176 and distances {100, 220, 20 sqrt(58), 75, 35, 185}, shows up immediately, then come three with max(r,s)=192, etc. I left this to run overnight, and the 544th set, with max(r,s)=4680, had an integer sixth distance. --Michael -- It is very dark and after 2000. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a bleen.
On 12/3/06, Michael Kleber <michael.kleber@gmail.com> wrote:
Okay, I think I have one. The six integer distances are {1449, 2706, 2775, 4097, 5402, 6253}.
Congratulations! This one checks out with two distinct planar charts at [1449, 2706, 2775, 4097, 5402, 6253] [1449, 2706, 2775, 6253, 5402, 4097] The sum is 22682 --- my program was not going to get there any time soon. Now perhaps we can all go away and do something useful. [I wonder what the smallest example is ...] WFL
On 12/3/06, Michael Kleber <michael.kleber@gmail.com> wrote:
... I tried a search based on a geometric construction that I at first thought was the one Dan suggested last weeked, but rereading I realized it's not. Oh, but it is one half of Bill Thurston's method that gives triply-planar distance sets.
So can you go the whole hog and find an integer triply-planar hexad? Just wondering ... WFL
WFL asked:
So can you go the whole hog and find an integer triply-planar hexad?
Since you suggested it, I tried, and it doesn't look promising. The search is easier -- it just involves iterating over all triangles with integer side-lengths and height -- but now you need three constraints (of the form "n is a perfect square") to be satisfied, which is a tall order. I ran it overnight and made it past height=25000, and found only 28 times where one of the three unspecified distances was rational (the 3-4-5 triangle providing the first two of these); I never saw two or more rationals. So there may be integer triply-planar hexads, but this isn't the way to find them... --Michael -- It is very dark and after 2000. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a bleen.
participants (3)
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Daniel Asimov -
Fred lunnon -
Michael Kleber