SUDOKU Sculpture

Look at this object. It is composed of 81 hexagonal bipyramid pieces. It is a level two approximation model of the hexagonal bipyramid fractal . It is in a large transparent acrylic resin 32-face polhhedron with 12 square faces. Six of them have red edges and other six have yellow edges.

When this object is looked at from these 12 square faces, it looks square with the voids disappearing. It it true both for red-edged faces and yellow-edged faces.

When you look from different directions, you can find different shapes. Try to find those appearances which resemble the shapes of the limit in the page of hexagonal bipyramid fractal.

In all the 12 square appearances, all the 81 hexagonal bipyramid pieces look square and thus we have 9 x 9 grid of squares. These 81 pieces are colored with 9 colors, and they are colored so that all the 9 colors appear in all the lines, columns, and 3x3 blocks in all the 12 square appearances. This is nothing but the solution of SUDOKU puzzle. There are 30 solorings of this kind to this object, when those coloring equivalent through change of colors and rotation of the object are identified. Among them, this coloring has the highest symmetry.

It is displayed in the Bridges conference . At that time, we used a acrylic resin polhhedron with pink and yellow square faces.

Here is a VRML file showing the shape of this object.

The date of construction: 2006. 9. 5. (Acrylic Frame 2007. 6. 3.)

Special Thanks: Keiji Sugihara, Yohei Masuda

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Copyright © 2007, 2008 Hideki Tsuiki. All rights reserved