Domino Chain
Reactions
Bill Briggs
Mathematics
Department
University of Colorado at Denver
Imagine standing, say, 10 meters from
a wall with a bag full of dominoes. As everyone knows, if you build a
line of dominoes, all standing on edge, between you and the wall, it
will undergo a chain reaction when the first domino is tipped. How
should you arrange the dominoes in order to minimize the travel time of
the chain reaction (a) when the dominoes have a uniform spacing and (b)
when the dominoes may have arbitrary spacing? While these problems may
sound frivolous, their solutions involve a delightful combination of
mathematical modeling, numerical calculations, and symbolic analysis -
and they lead to some surprising results.
