@kake
Inspired by your post.
https://mastodon.me.uk/@bbcmicrobot/114569840904150009
@geoffl Oh, very nice! So now we have two ways of making the result obvious :)
I had been pondering writing a renderer in order to make it easier to play around with ideas for finding matrices for the higher-order snowflakes. I have a hunch that the matrices will need to have fourfold symmetry like this one does. I suppose really though the first step should be emailing Sébastien Labbé to find out how they discovered this one.
@kake I'd programned things in BASIC to generate Hitomezashi stitch patterns before and was interested in this variation when I saw you post about it. As it has 4 fold symetry you really only need 1/4 of the probability matrix to genarate it. Unlike the normal matrix where a location only excludes any others in the same row or column this requires each cell chosen in the complete matrix to also have 3 others, as 90° rotations, also selected.
@geoffl Indeed, yes, that’s what I meant by my hunch. However: the snowflakes all have fourfold symmetry but I don’t think it *necessarily* follows that the matrices also have to have it. It might be possible to construct a non-symmetric matrix that has a symmetric snowflake in the middle.
@kake With a bigger grid to stitch across you can have a matrix that has larger offsets on one side than the other without breaking the snowflake (as no points of the probability matrix lay on, or need to lay next to, the boundry of the snowflake) but I can't tell if you can fill the rest of the probability matrix without breaking it. Feels like it should work.
