[HN Gopher] Approximating Mathematical Constants Using Minecraft
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Approximating Mathematical Constants Using Minecraft
Author : belter
Score : 31 points
Date : 2024-11-29 14:53 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| CarpaDorada wrote:
| Both authors are university professors (I thought, maybe middle
| school students wrote this). Is this a stunt to attract US
| students to mathematics research? Why does it seem that everyone
| bends over backwards in the US instead of confronting the math
| education problem head on? Don't teach math with tiktok videos,
| don't approximate it with video games, just teach it head on, and
| teach it well. If it wasn't for all these meddling lobbyists
| (calculators, really?) $300 calculus text books, idiots chairing
| every math ed committee, etc etc, we'd have something better.
|
| I think this arXiv article could very well have been just a blog
| post. I don't get why they bothered with the pre-print... as if
| math research isn't low quality already.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| hear hear
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| First, a ton of arXiv articles are fairly low quality so
| nothing new there. Published math research though is of a
| fairly high quality but mostly irrelevant and too specialized.
| I doubt it is a stunt. Rather, it's probably a sign of late-
| stage research boredom where all the useful stuff has been done
| and now there's not much else to do but invent arcane puzzles
| for amusement.
| eesmith wrote:
| Monte Carlo integration to compute pi is not an arcane
| puzzle, given how often it's taught. We did it in my
| undergrad numerical methods course. In Fortran.
|
| I don't think any of these are arcane puzzles for someone who
| wants a mathematical career, which is the target audience
| (see, 'likely one of the first irrational numbers you
| encountered in your mathematical career').
|
| This is for undergraduate education. A 20 year old now was 6
| years old when Minecraft came out. A 20 year old now studying
| math has very likely played a lot of Minecraft.
|
| Also, the authors' respective institutions don't have a
| graduate level math program. Lynch's personal research is in
| combinatorics ("particularly connections between
| combinatorics and representation theory, topological
| combinatorics") and Weselcouch's is in "enumerative and
| algebraic combinatorics".
|
| Rather than attribute it to "late-stage research boredom",
| why not interpret it as two young math professors (they are
| both in their 30s, I think) coming up with interesting ideas
| for their undergrad, math-interested students?
| eesmith wrote:
| > Is this a stunt to attract US students to mathematics
| research?
|
| Like how the bowling ball pendulum lab is a stunt to attract
| students to physics, and the Briggs-Rauscher reaction a stunt
| to attract students to chemistry?
|
| Sure, why not. Define "stunt" broadly enough and it can include
| anything which piques the interest.
|
| > Why does it seem that everyone bends over backwards in the US
| instead of confronting the math education problem head on?
|
| Why does it seem you have no joy?
|
| > don't approximate it with video games, just teach it head on
|
| This _is_ head-on teaching how to approximate the values of
| four different mathematical constants.
|
| You don't even get to the Minecraft way to approximate Apery's
| constant until you've read that it's a special case of the
| Riemann zeta , and seen two ways to define it (as an infinite
| sum and as an infinite product), in order to explain why the
| Minecraft method works.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| "Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Weselcouch! I teach math in Virginia. On
| this channel we drink coffee and solve math problems. We also
| dabble in Minecraft"
|
| Two spaces after a period and a YouTube channel with a few
| dozens of views per video. The co-author is his wife.
|
| "Mathematics Magazine intended audience is teachers of
| collegiate mathematics, especially at the junior/senior level,
| and their students."
|
| I wish them the best. And I'm glad everyone got another
| sentence on their CV. But wow.
| kbelder wrote:
| The proper amount of spaces after a period.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| People learn better when it is fun, playful, and seems to
| relate to or be useful for things they care about. Doing so is
| part of teaching it "head on" and teaching it well.
|
| I've actually been teaching my 2nd grade son Math recently
| though Minecraft- things like using euclidean coordinates,
| triangulating positions, etc. we're both having fun and he's
| learning valuable ideas.
|
| You seem to have a dry, joyless, and uninspired view of math
| and how it should be taught. Traditional math education has
| done an impressive job of turning something incredibly fun and
| useful into something that seems stodgy, dry, and pointless.
|
| I've always had a fun playful view of math that I learned from
| my own parents and mentors, and I think that is what has led me
| to continue studying and using math to solve real world
| scientific problems as an adult.
| 71bw wrote:
| The "quit having fun" meme immediately springs to mind[1]. I,
| personally, know damn well that if this was around when I was
| at this level of mathematics I'd probably enjoy the field a
| bit more instead of growing a life-long hate and fear of math
|
| [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/quit-having-fun
| dh2022 wrote:
| Re: "I've actually been teaching my 2nd grade son Math" - it
| seems to me you proved the parent poster's point: this type
| of scientific communication is better suited for middle-
| school audience than university audience. A blog post seems
| more appropriate than posting it on arxiv.com with full
| academic credentials...
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Math education techniques are a legitimate field of
| research worthy of publication. Science education is an
| academic field that publishes just like any other. Arxiv is
| a preprint server and not a journal - they don't
| discriminate based on "impact" or interest to a certain
| audience. If you want that, read a journal that meets your
| desired criteria. It is perfectly reasonable to publish
| methods for educating children, or even results intended
| for an audience of children in Arxiv. A key purpose of a
| preprint server is to circumvent gatekeeping.
| itishappy wrote:
| Why? Because it's a "cheaper" medium? What's inappropriate
| about exposing middle-schoolers to approachable academic
| literature?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Absolutely- there is no reason children can't and
| shouldn't learn science by participating as it is done by
| real scientists- reading and even writing and publishing
| their own papers. I am an academic PI and am involved
| within teaching science by directly involving undergrads
| and even school aged children in real research, and
| having them write and publish their own papers as primary
| author. The idea of gatekeeping science as not for
| children is awful in my opinion.
|
| Moreover, just because Minecraft is a video game doesn't
| mean it has no place in real scientific research- it is a
| virtual world with a modular plugin system that can allow
| a researcher to create and interact with simulations of
| almost any type of system imaginable. People have
| executed realistic physics experiments, designed working
| cpus, etc in it. I think there is a lot of potential for
| really significant research within it.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Oh no, how dare educators do outreach to the next generation of
| people who might be interested in their field...
|
| > _" just teach it head on, and teach it well."_
|
| Seriously, as someone who was an assistant-teacher at
| university for a year, few things annoy me more than people
| with very strong opinions on education, whose confidence is
| very clearly based on not knowing the slightest thing about how
| education works.
|
| Good luck trying to brute-force information into unwilling
| brains. Especially in a form where there is no connection back
| to the lived experience of the people being taught, meaning
| they have no point of entry.
|
| Or perhaps your point is that we shouldn't do outreach, and
| only the people who already found maths on their own are
| allowed into this exclusive club of people who consider
| themselves oh so intelligent? Like being in favor the
| mathematicians equivalent of a "gatekeeping hipster" attitude?
|
| Honestly, I don't know which interpretation looks worse.
| js8 wrote:
| I don't think either of those was GP's intent. I think it's
| more of a lament about anti-intellectual and anti-engineering
| culture in the U.S.
|
| I interpret it that you shouldn't need these gimmicks to get
| people interested in math, but rather change the system so
| people would be more interested in those jobs or fields, by
| making engineers, academics and teachers into more respected
| members of the society.
|
| I am from Czechia and I see this as a feature of neoliberal
| capitalism. The socialist movement, both in the Western and
| Eastern bloc, had a lot of emphasis on educating people.
| China now does something similar. But under neoliberalism,
| the respect of people is tied to money-making or
| entrepreneurship. This view, critical of low priority of
| education under neoliberalism, seems to be shared by many
| people outside the U.S. today.
| nxobject wrote:
| I do have a soft spot in my heart for Soviet popular
| science and mathematics books, especially those that do
| recreational explorations - anyone of any age can enjoy
| them, but to someone young enough I'm sure they would've
| been totally engrossing.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| America is a democracy and demonstrably most people's priority
| is not good education when it comes to schooling.
|
| A significant portion of the people who reject the school
| system do so entirely based on fundamentalist religious reason,
| specifically things like "evolution is a thing" and "here's how
| you have safe sex".
|
| The primary driver of American school boards in some states
| literally seems to be getting the bible into American schools
| for some reason.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Don't make things up, people don't reject "here's how you
| have safe sex". Maybe some individuals do, but majority of
| parents support calm and thorough explanation that sex exists
| and that's how adults do that safely so you 16yo's won't
| regret it later.
|
| The problem is that thanks to 1% of overly active idiots it
| quicky degraded to "gender affirming closets" at our
| libraries and transgender lessons for 4th graders.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| >The problem is that thanks to 1% of overly active idiots
| it quicky degraded to "gender affirming closets" at our
| libraries and transgender lessons for 4th graders.
|
| just 1%?
| cedilla wrote:
| Are you simply trolling or just so cynical that you can't read
| about some people having fun with mathematics on computers on a
| site called Hacker News without feeling the need to insult a
| whole discipline and building strawmen?
|
| I don't know what you think the "math education problem" is,
| but I guarantee that being nasty to people is not the way to
| solve it.
| dh2022 wrote:
| I agree with the parent poster. A blog post seems more
| appropriate for these types of fun (math-related) activities.
| The Try Things on Your Own sections seems more appropriate
| for middle-schoolers / high-schoolers than University
| students/professors.
|
| At least this was not supported by an NSF grant (There are
| problems more deserving of NSF grants than approximating pi
| with square blocks.)
| nxobject wrote:
| I don't think the arXiv makes any claim to require a
| minimum level of originality or contribution to the state
| of the art, beyond "write it up as a paper in full academic
| prose and it can't just be a proposal", especially in a
| history and overview subsection dedicated to exposition.
| The authors have a pretty good claim for getting published
| in an expository journal like, say, the MAA Monthly.
|
| (Also, I don't think this is any surprise to you, but an
| NSF proposal requires engagement with the literature, and a
| statement of contributions.)
| mung_daal wrote:
| they don't want people to have command over powerful symbols
| because it makes men smarter, that would be bad for
| universities they deliberately make people lost, even your
| thought of "upfront" teaching which might but maybe not include
| the current status of throwing 50 formula questions at students
| for years, when it has to do with maths oriented people should
| be given the primordial understanding that every historical
| mathematician was working with, knowing some basic enough
| greek, beginning with symbols and deriving just simple things
| and binary and incompleteness, etc.. instead we've made a few
| generations of absolute fakes with ZERO taste for symbolic
| beauty, because some symbols are not permitted by the party..
| does the number 2001 or 1984 scare you?
| itishappy wrote:
| I think showing students well formatted papers about
| approachable subjects is a great idea that more teachers should
| adopt! What's wrong with modeling the actual domain? "Serious
| mathematicians" communicate by publishing papers, but for some
| reason my only exposure to papers was on my own time outside of
| school, where they were largely intractable. This includes
| college math and physics courses.
| loehnsberg wrote:
| As they are using blocks (that cover a square area), I don't
| understand why use MC when you can actually compute the ratios
| directly based on the area covered by blocks that are less or
| equal some distance from a defined center - other than it being
| more fun to use slime ofc.
| the12354 wrote:
| "This article is a proof of concept that Minecraft can be used
| in higher education. We should note that the goal of this
| article is not to have the most accurate approximations
| possible, the goal is to inspire people to have fun while
| learning about various mathematical topics."
| golol wrote:
| I learned that 1 / e is the limit probability of a permutation
| not having any fixed points, nice.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Wonder if the authors are familiar with https://www.luanti.org/.
| Just as "fun" surely, and less nudging kids into the jaws of the
| proprietary toll-extracting behemoths of our world.
| guipsp wrote:
| If you ask a random kid if they know what luanti is, they would
| have no clue.
| westurner wrote:
| Read the docs / documentation / API docs (and contribute)
|
| Read the source
|
| Write tests with test assertions and run them with a test
| runner
|
| Learnxinyminutes > Lua:
| https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/lua/
|
| Learnxinyminutes > Python:
| https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Yeah exactly, and they'll only know things that people tell
| them about. So tell them about Luanti.
|
| I have given lots of classes to kids and young people, and if
| I followed your logic there I would have only told them about
| stuff I thought they already knew about. Luckily, I didn't.
| westurner wrote:
| Luanti (formerly minetest) is open source, written in Lua, has
| an API with mediawiki docs, and has a vscode extension:
| https://github.com/minetest/minetest
|
| Luanti wiki > Modding intro:
| https://dev.minetest.net/Modding_Intro
|
| SensorCraft is open source, written in Python, and is built on
| the Pyglet OpenGL library (which might compile to WASM someday)
| https://github.com/AFRL-RY/SensorCraft
|
| /? Minecraft clone typescript site:github.com
| https://www.google.com/search?q=minecraft+clone+typescript+s...
|
| /?hnlog minecraft:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32657066 :
|
| > [ mcpi, pytest-minecraft, sensorcraft, ]
|
| mcpi supports "Minecraft: Pi edition" and "RaspberryJuice" (~
| Minecraft API on Bukkit server)
|
| minecraft-pi-reborn is an open source rewrite of "Minecraft: Pi
| edition" that's written in C++. It looks like there's a glfw.h
| header in libreborn. Emscripten-glfw is a port of glfw which
| can be compiled to WASM. Glfw wraps OpenGL. Browsers have
| WebGL.
|
| MCPI-Revival/minecraft-pi-reborn: https://github.com/MCPI-
| Revival/minecraft-pi-reborn docs: https://github.com/MCPI-
| Revival/minecraft-pi-reborn/blob/mas...
| eesmith wrote:
| Given that it ends:
|
| > While we chose to use Minecraft to approximate irrational
| numbers, we believe there are many settings where this type of
| experimentation is possible. We would love to hear from anyone
| who finds inspiration from this paper and does some exploring
| of their own!
|
| I'm sure they would be happy with you testing Luanti to see if
| there are equivalents.
|
| Like, how do you generate random dots in Luanti? How do you
| record deaths? Or do you use other methods entirely? Is
| velocity isotropic or is traveling on the diagonal
| faster/slower than horizontal/vertical?
|
| You could go one step further and write it up.
| westurner wrote:
| FWIW 22/7 and 666/212 are Rational approximations for pi.
|
| You can write a script to find other integer/integer
| approximations for pi and other transcendental numbers like e.
| genpfault wrote:
| Hah! There's a whole Wiki page[1] about pi approximations!
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_%CF%80
| mung_daal wrote:
| absolute piss state of academia
| Imnimo wrote:
| >Therefore, to approximate the value of [?]2, we can simply
| measure the time it takes for a player to travel at a constant
| rate along one of the legs and the time it takes for that player
| to travel along the hypotenuse.
|
| In many games, moving diagonally (e.g. by pressing Left and
| Forward at the same time) gives the player a higher speed than
| moving orthogonally. The sideways and forward movements are
| added, rather than normalized, and so you could traverse the
| hypotenuse in the same amount of time as traversing a leg. I know
| this was the case at one time in Minecraft, but not sure if it
| still is. Presumably they did their measurement by just facing
| along the hypotenuse and walking forward, but it's the sort of
| weird game mechanic you have to be on guard for when doing this
| sort of thing.
| genpfault wrote:
| > moving diagonally (e.g. by pressing Left and Forward at the
| same time) gives the player a higher speed than moving
| orthogonally.
|
| Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) shipped that way; it was
| eventually patched[1].
|
| [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/6146
| ljsprague wrote:
| I would like to see them do Khinchin's constant.
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