Permutations of a children's trainset visualized

Nice.

There's a note at the end that you can get more solutions by forcing a little give in the track. It's also worth noting, if you're actually buying these for your kid to play with that there's aftermarket 3rd party flexbile connectors available on Amazon, which reduces the frustration of building a really "cool" track and finding that it's not actually possible to make that final connection.

I really want this for Marklin track (HO trains). The tracks have some interesting geometric constraints, but can also produce really nice layouts: http://www.scarm.info/blog/tutorials-and-examples/examples-o...

Ideally, I'd input my platform shape and size, the list of pieces I have on hand, and then ask the engine to produce valid track layouts.

Author's favorite: https://i.imgur.com/7Z3QfF0.png

My wife and I bought a set of tracks for the kids. Then we bought a couple more sets for ourselves. We have a friendly competition to see who can build the most elaborate/aesthetics configurations. Occasionally, the kids get to play with them too.

John Graham-Cumming posted something like this some years ago.

related to this:

http://www.math.ku.dk/~eilers/lego.html

This reminds me of the C64 game Scalextric, which had an integrated level editor with blocks inspired by its real-life counterpart. There were turns covering different angles, which (at the time) made it very hard for me to create a custom level. :)

https://youtu.be/StYH6GPsddU

This is very neat. When playing with this set, I've wondered about this.

...

It seems the text says for 12 pieces there are 2 solutions, but the animation shows four.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a check to see whether the bridge pieces are together. (When all 's' pieces are used there has to be at least one connected pair).

Fun project. The output would be easier to understand as small multiples instead on animated gifs.