Ant on a Rubber Band: Gap Filler

Many thanks to David Yerle for making me aware of a couple of assumptions I hadn’t made explicit in my last snapshot. I’ve updated my spreadsheet accordingly.

Ant on a Rubber Band

My ability to handle the moderately advanced calculus required to solve this puzzle is frustratingly poor, but at least now I am confident that the ant will indeed reach the end; provided it’s marching upright, has a stride length equivalent to 1cm, and only has one foot on the ground at a time. Alternatively – I suppose – it could hop.

If anyone’s interested in commissioning a look-up table that shows where the ant will be in space and time with respect to any given point on a uniformly stretching rubber band, please don’t hesitate to contact me. The initial taut length of the rubber band and the velocity of P100 can be modified with ease. For a small extra fee I can add an adjustable acceleration component.

Here’s some free information I’ve derived from the spreadsheet so far.

Your Grandma was right for the wrong reasons: rubber bands effectively control ants, but not because they hate the smell or intuitively fear them. They just can’t physically keep their feet in 6 different time zones at once.

The more numbers you need to produce between three equidistant points on a uniformly stretching rubber band in order to model the ongoing path of an ant , the smaller the entropy of the rubber band gets. This would appear to be in direct contradiction with what The Law of Entropy (in our universe) suggests i.e., “that as time passes, less and less energy will become available for use.”

Maybe that rubber band is nothing at all
like the universe it’s meant to represent.

SNAP!

New Ant on a Rubber Band Puzzle Solution: Proof of Concept

maekitso’s Excel solution to The Ant on a Rubber Band Puzzle

On DIY Cyborgs

Interesting stuff, David. We ‘ve contemplated the pros and cons of personal reality augmentation from time to time but were n’t aware of the biohacking community that your post gave us heads-up to. We appreciate the awareness, but more confused now than we were before, so not sure if we should thank you. So thinking I should try to think it through on my own from here.

It ‘s probably unfortunate from the outset that, at least according to the wikipedia entry for DIYbio, “citizen scientists, biohackers, amateur biologists, and do-it-yourself biological engineers” are all lumped in under the one title of “biohacker”.

I say unfortunate because it ‘s generally widely encompassing terms like this that lead to confusion and introduce often irrelevant fears when the name is raised: such as the fear that, if I want to join