[Greenbuilding] Building by Intelligent Rearrangement - an idea

[Corwyn]

On Sep 12, 2006, at 03:43, malcolm lambert wrote:

> Hello, I am new to the Greenbuilding list.
>
>   I am developing a method that has the potential to increase the use 
> of natural, unprocessed stone as a building material, using lots of 
> computing power rather than lots of energy. It's a method for building 
> walls from irregularly-shaped stones where a computer acquires the 3D 
> shape of several stones using a 3d scanner or digital camera then the 
> computer starts fitting the stones to each other and to the wall 
> shape, in the virtual world. The computer outputs instructions to the 
> builder as to the position and orientation of the stones to be placed 
> in the wall.

I'm sorry but I think I am going to have to join the nay sayers on this 
one.  First, as a computer problem, this sounds a lot like the backpack 
problem (with the added complexity of 3D rotations), which is 
NP-complete.  Of course, an approximation may be good enough.

There are the additional problems with scanning, and marking all the 
stones, and displaying the design in a way which makes it easy to 
determine how the go together.  Have you tried to make a map of stones 
with both axes clearly shown for a large number of stones?  Irregular 
shaped stones are also just plain hard to stack.  Millimeters are 
enough to be the difference between success and failure.  And the real 
killer, it would require picking up each rock at least once, probably 
twice more than current method.

Please let us know when can  show us how wrong we are.

Thank You Kindly,

Corwyn

-- 
Corwyn
Kermit didn't know the half of it...
http://www.greenfret.com/
corwyn at greenfret.com