Optics: Leading lights

Arbour lights

Amongst the theoreticians there was a subspecies who interacted with experimentalists — these theorists tried to make sure that their ideas were testable and that someone tested them. Preeminent amongst these was Francis Crick who wrote all the quotes above shown in red italics (taken from Crick’s autobiographical book What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery; Basic Books, New ...

Bezier Lights

In this paper we introduce Bezier Lights, an intelligent lighting system that allows users to intuitively establish virtual boundaries in indoor environments. Boundaries can be easily created/modified by arranging the layouts of disk-shaped devices (“stones”) on the building floor. The immediate purpose of the system is to assist users in incorporating location-aware capabilities into private p...

Lights out.

5.1 Unbalancing Lights

Consider a square n× n array of lights (see Figure 5.1). There is one switch corresponding to each row and each column (i.e., 2n switches). Throwing a switch changes the state of all the lights in the corresponding row or column. We now consider the problem of setting the switches so as to maximize the number of lights that are on, starting from an arbitrary initial on/off configuration of the ...

Self-organizing Traffic Lights

Steering traffic in cities is a very complex task, since improving efficiency involves the coordination of many actors. Traditional approaches attempt to optimize traffic lights for a particular density and configuration of traffic. The disadvantage of this lies in the fact that traffic densities and configurations change constantly. Traffic seems to be an adaptation problem rather than an opti...