Application

This is a fascinating idea:  the company Bolefloor produces wooden flooring using natural, irregular boards, as seen on the right.  Instead of making all the wood pieces rectangular, they simply figure out how to fit them together!

According to this article on BoingBoing, Bolefor uses sophisticated scanning, sorting, and optimizing technologies to piece together their assortment of random boards.  Once the puzzle is assembled, the boards are then fitted with tongue-and-groove joints for easy installation.

An innovative idea, with beautiful results!

But how do you design an efficient algorithm that can look at all kinds of boards and see how to best fit them together?  That’s a lot of irregular shapes to sort, rotate, flip, and compare!

This is a great poster-style infographic in the New York Times about the how the Kepler telescope looks for planets in space.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/31/science/space/planet.html

The infographic explains in basic terms how Kepler looks at stars in a small square of space and keeps watch for “flickers” of light as potential planets pass in front of them.  Larger objects cause a greater “flicker”, naturally, but the actually decrease in brightness is still small.   There are also some nice presentations on confirming the existence of planets and the distribution, by mass, size, and orbit size, of the known exoplanets.

And it’s working:  six new planets, and counting!