Binary Thinking

The triangular tile set I generated is a good example of how you can use binary numbers to describe a set of objects. This is a very useful tool for doing any sort of computational work with this kind of set. The triangle tiles each have 4 regions that can either be filled or empty. On or Off. 1 or 0. Therefore each possible tile can be described with a 4 digit binary number, each digit corresponding to one of the 4 regions. This opens up lots of possibilities. For example, if you wanted to rotate a tile, you could just shift the values of each digit to get the correct result. I used a similar technique when I was working with Color Gradients that tied each property of a gradient to digits in a numerical sequence. This allowed me to generate new gradients computationally using a genetic algorithm.

BinaryGrid2