[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hypergraph, a data structure library to gen...
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       Show HN: Hypergraph, a data structure library to generate directed
       hypergraphs
        
       Author : yamafaktory
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2021-08-23 11:34 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | jesuslop wrote:
       | What would you use it for?
        
         | mshockwave wrote:
         | The wiki page for hypergraph has some nice applications.
        
         | taliesinb wrote:
         | I've been exploring hypergraphs a lot over the last 12 months.
         | They are an _incredibly_ rich way to look at a lot of existing
         | (and new) mathematics, so much so that I think hypergraphs will
         | have a good chance to become a signature mathematical structure
         | over the next 100 years.
         | 
         | Unfortunately people don't yet have a good notion (or notation)
         | for what a hypergraph even is! The wikipedia page is a disaster
         | area, for example. Partly this is due to a lack of careful,
         | general groundwork on how to think about hypergraphs. I'm
         | confident this will get done though -- and aim to play a role
         | in that. My personal view is that you need you really need to
         | adopt an ADT-type viewpoint to do this, but I'll have to leave
         | it at that for now.
        
         | yamafaktory wrote:
         | Social media for example.
        
         | ABeeSea wrote:
         | Not sure if "it" refers to this particular package or hyper
         | graphs in general. Simplicial complexes are widely used in
         | mathematics for many decades and they are simply hyper graphs
         | where every subset of an edge is an edge. So take the
         | tetrahedron, for example. If (x1, x2, x3) are connected by a
         | hyperedge (technically one of the triangular faces of the
         | tetrahedron), then (x1,x2), (x1,x3) and (x2,x3) are also
         | hyperedges (the lines bordering the tetrahedron face). A
         | general hypergraph removes the subsets of edges are edges
         | property.
        
           | gspr wrote:
           | And for simplicial complexes there's a neat data structure:
           | https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02581
           | 
           | It's implemented (minus some features) in e.g. GUDHI.
        
       | istorical wrote:
       | I can't be the only person who has wanted to try bringing the
       | wolfram physics project style hypergraph generation rules into
       | some 3D game engine like unity or unreal but was too intimidated
       | to start.
       | 
       | I've done some cool stuff with generating fractals like these
       | ones made by Softology
       | 
       | https://www.flickr.com/photos/39445835@N05/albums/7215769136...
       | 
       | https://www.flickr.com/photos/39445835@N05/albums/7215768121...
       | using visons of chaos to create .obj files and then importing
       | them as voxels in unreal engine using voxel plugin, but hit some
       | limits quite quickly in terms of data size / memory usage and how
       | large of a fractal structure I could visualize (example:
       | megastructure in this demo of a vr game I was working on
       | https://photos.app.goo.gl/V7NrtG4bCbU3EEwy8)
       | 
       | but would love to try to create some way to visualize and
       | interact with large hypergraph structures in 3d space like the
       | wolfram ones:
       | https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/04/041...
       | https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/04/041...
       | 
       | Wonder if this library could be a good place to start to look
       | into this. you obviously need some language / format to store
       | info about hypergraphs and build them up (what this seems like it
       | could help with?) and then some way to render them or create
       | procedural meshes (which in and of itself will be difficult,
       | although I've seen some people have success with stuff like
       | fractal procedural meshes (https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/wip-
       | procedural-fractal-mes...).
       | 
       | The standard noise generation algorithms (perlin, simplex, iq
       | noise, value, voronoi, etc) and rendering algorithms like
       | marching cubes capture all the procedural 'terrain' / structure
       | attention/hype in games and media, but I think cinematic sets or
       | game environments built of hypergraphs or fractals are an
       | unmined/overloocked resource.
       | 
       | if I could get a team of 2-5 and enough to pay them for a few
       | years, I feel like you could combine hypergraphs and fractals
       | 'terrain' with ue5 nanite to make the memory requirements of the
       | huge / high fidelity meshes lower and make some really cool
       | stuff.
        
         | yamafaktory wrote:
         | What triggers the initial willingness to implement something
         | with hypergraphs was indeed the Wolfram physics project!
         | https://github.com/yamafaktory/hypergraph/discussions/11#dis...
        
       | trentnelson wrote:
       | Hypergraphs are neat; I used them to implement a perfect hash
       | library in C: https://github.com/tpn/perfecthash.
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-23 23:03 UTC)