Boole Domino Portrait
George Boole inspired so much of the world we live in today, this application shows how finetuning others work can lead to enhanced performance.
University College Cork is looking forward to hosting the Cork School’s Enterprise Programme Regional Final on March 6th during which the George Boole 200 team will offer each finalist, an opportunity to have their Domino Portrait taken and printed so they can have as a souvenir from the event.
As part of the George Boole 200 celebrations, the SFI funded Insight Centre for Data Analytics in UCC has donated its Domino Portrait Generation software or ‘APP’ to be used to be used as part of an outreach initiative in engaging with the community. A ‘Domino Portrait’ is an approximation of an image generated using a specified number of sets of dominoes, using each individual domino once and once only. Other research groups have generated these portraits using integer linear programming techniques that provide optimal solutions, but these can be slow and do not scale well to larger portraits. The Insight-UCC solution overcomes these limitations by utilising techniques from operations research, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to provide high quality portraits, irrespective of the image size. Starting from a randomly generated template of blank domino shapes, a subsequent optimal placement of dominoes can be achieved in constant time when the problem is viewed as a minimum cost flow. Combining techniques from computer vision and large neighborhood search quickly improve the portrait to be visually indistinguishable from those obtained using integer linear programming techniques. This solution is several orders of magnitude faster that those reported elsewhere. A peer-reviewed research paper on the implementation available from this link.
In a broader sense, the field of computer science behind the Domino Portrait solution is known as Combinatorial Optimisation, a mathematical concept that can be traced back to George Boole. Dr. Chrys Ngwa, Education & Public Engagement Manager for Insight Centre for Data Analytics, UCC encourages all of the students who will be present at the event to have their image captured "it is a fantastic opportunity for students to get to know the influence of George Boole on our modern world".
Wishing all the participating finalists the best of luck.
.jpg "Insight Centre for Data Analytics")
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