For the past several days, I’ve been far, far away (well, about 150 minutes anyway,) attending a conference, something that’s been building for a while now. I do have to say, it went quite well, and if things go as hoped, this is only the start.
I’ve hinted at this before, and intend to go into it in detail in a few posts (from my own perspective, of course,) but the gist of it is, my friend Dan Palmer created a new playing card deck, and I was enlisted to do the graphics end of it, contributing snarky comments, rejected names, and bothersome questions pro bono. Along the way, Dan wrote a paper on the physics of the deck and submitted it for consideration of the Bridges 2024 Conference on mathematical connections in art, music, architecture, and culture, for which it was accepted and he was invited to give a short presentation there. I was invited along even though I’m inept on all five counts – I think I was the court jester or something.
The comments on the paper were distinctly encouraging, and the subsequent presentation on it went over quite well. The follow-up to this was having a table at the conference’s Family Day at the Science Museum of Virginia, right in the opening rotunda, which meant lots of people going past to see what was happening, and more than a few stopping by (and playing a round!) out of interest. Out of the four-hour session therein, there were only three periods when no one was at the table, and all of them lasted less than five minutes. Not only that, but we had people of all ages there – Dan has several games already developed for the deck and they range in difficulty and, most especially, between cooperative and competitive aspects. We have a basic website for it that we made sure we had available for the conference, and this can be found here – it’s terrible right now due mostly to time constraints, but it will be changing rapidly.
We weren’t really set up to do this properly, but we did get an offhand video of Dan’s presentation, which he has graciously allowed to be public, so I include it here – it’s only ten minutes, but it goes into how the relationships of the new deck work. Dan, literally, was working on new games overnight while we were at this conference, because that’s Dan.
The Mathematics and Design of a New Deck of Playing Cards from Al Denelsbeck on Vimeo.
We have to give credit to the organizers of the conference, which had widely varied subjects and presentations, along with some fantastic art, and ensured that everything went extremely well despite Richmond’s attempts to discourage car travel. We also have to thank all of the volunteers that showed for Family Day, including the two that assisted us, Noelle and Charlie (I hope I have those spelled right – I didn’t think to check.)
More will be along – we’re going in several directions right now, above and beyond our regular pursuits, so they’ll sneak in here and there – but the response so far has been gratifying. And if you want to know more, you know how to reach me.
