Packing

Now that I had some structure, I could get to work. I began by trying to affix some circles to other edges of my basic square shape.

I was able to make quick progress towards covering the edges with circles of a uniform size.

Unfortunately, as I tried rotating the shape I realised that my code still had issues.

While this type of packing could still yield results, there was another method that I wanted to try as well.

I experimented with packing just a square full of circles, each assigned randomly.

While this method generally leaves gaps between the circles, I simply calculated the distance from the circle to it’s closest neighbour and increased its radius accordingly, giving the above image.

Next, I overlayed a shape I had onto the random packing and wrote code to remove any circles that were not near one of its edges, leaving me with the following:

I believe this is a promising avenue, and tomorrow I will look towards inducing a graph between the remaining circles. I will do this by either altering existing circles or creating new ones to fill in any remaining gaps between adjacent groups.