Claude Shannon and his juggling robot
Couldn’t resist this, although it’s purely link propagation. If you don’t know who Claude Shannon is, this might not be so exciting. But the excellent blog collision detection has a post on juggling as a physical Turing test, which links to a wonderful short piece of video showing Shannon first juggling, then demonstrating his own juggling robot, “W.C. Fields”. As a juggler and computer scientist myself, it’s wonderful to see that one of the greats has devoted so much attention to the art.
Actually, following the link trail a bit further I found Arthur Lewbel’s obituary for Shannon (the source of the movie), with many juggling references and the following statement of Shannon’s “Juggling Theorem”:
(F+D)H=(V+D)N, where F is the time a ball spends in the air, D is the time a ball spends in a hand, V is the time a hand is vacant, N is the number of balls juggled, and H is the number of hands. Which just goes to show, no matter how anchored in the real world a mathematician might seem to be, the lure of generalisation just can’t be ignored. Number of hands?!?