Re:Juggling by numbers: How notation revealed new tricks
by ColinWright on Thursday December 20, 2012 @06:51AM
(#4947210)
Cool link, and interesting - thank you. It clearly has a lot in common with music notation for pure percussive instruments - time along the horizontal axis, an action indicated vertically.
The thing about all these other notations is that they are descriptive, but not predictive. The thing that sets SiteSwap apart is that within juggling there are things that are (with certain axioms) fundamentally impossible. The notation encodes that in its structure, and then predicts the existence of things that are possible.
In plain SiteSwap we assume that the juggler throws and catches only one ball at a time. With that restriction, there are illegal combinations, and SiteSwap lets us work out what they are so we can avoid them. An example is 543. The balls throw in that combination all land at the same time, and hence is illegal in Vanilla SiteSwap tricks.
This has, in turn, led to a lot of people explicitly deciding to break the rules, and seeing what comes of that.
The thing about all these other notations is that they are descriptive, but not predictive. The thing that sets SiteSwap apart is that within juggling there are things that are (with certain axioms) fundamentally impossible. The notation encodes that in its structure, and then predicts the existence of things that are possible.
In plain SiteSwap we assume that the juggler throws and catches only one ball at a time. With that restriction, there are illegal combinations, and SiteSwap lets us work out what they are so we can avoid them. An example is 543. The balls throw in that combination all land at the same time, and hence is illegal in Vanilla SiteSwap tricks.
This has, in turn, led to a lot of people explicitly deciding to break the rules, and seeing what comes of that.