c4countdown

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/features/code/

I've not watched any of the episodes nor even looked at any of the stuff but a quick glance at this tells me it's something that people on this forum might like. I could be completely wrong, I'm basing this judgement on 10 seconds looking at the home page and a short ad I saw the other night.

I've been watching it. It's alright.

He was talking about how the sphere is the most "efficent" shape - the one that minimises surface area for a given volume. That got me thinking - presumably the five regular polyhedra (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron) are the most efficient for the number of sides that they have (although I might be wrong). So it would be interesting to know what the most efficient shapes are for other numbers of sides. I would imagine the Archimedean solids would have something to say for the numbers of sides where they apply, but that doesn't cover much of the ground. But then again there's an infinite number of prisms and anti-prisms, which are probably only not considered to be Archimedean solids because there's an infinite number of them, so would spoil the "specialness".

Stuff that could be relevant - Surface-area-to-volume ratio, Sphericity.

The winner is the first person to make all the most "efficient" polyhedra for each number of sides up to 100 and send them to me.

Without going into the calculations I think buckyballs and similar geodesic domes would be up there for many-faceted objects.

Is it a game or a puzzle then?

Only watched the first episode (because of a holiday) and I think it is good, but has drastic difficulty jumps e.g. from explaining what pi is to explaining how imaginary numbers help planes land and stuff.

I watched a film once from blockbusters it had a rating of 3.142, think it was pi- rated.

My friend and quiz sensai is one of the three finalists for this, after what sounded like a pretty mental weekend:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thecode/