Bio

Alex is currently an undergrad at Brown University, where he plans to concentrate in computer science. He is a proud alumnus of HCSSiM, where he first met Dr. Wolfram. He recently published his first free iPhone app called Turing Turtle, and he’d like everyone to play it. He hopes to help spark the singularity by one day creating something more intelligent than himself.

Alex’s interests include rock climbing, playing music, experimental computation, game development, word games, and machine intelligence.

Project: Search for a Polyomino with a Forced Aperiodic Tiling

Polyominoes are described by Wolfram MathWorld as “a collection of n squares of equal size arranged with coincident sides.” Most small polyominoes can be used to tile the plane in a repeating periodic pattern. This means that you can translate the entire pattern by some (x, y), and it will line up perfectly with an untranslated copy of itself. My goal is simply to find a polyomino that can be tiled, but that can’t be tiled periodically. The resulting tiling may be either chaotic or contain some nested pattern.

Project-Related Demonstrations

Maze Solving with a 2D Cellular Automaton

Favorite Four-Color, Four State Turing Machine

Rule 128258964068024222052158