Boots – shoes – and leggings
Patent
1985-06-28
1988-01-05
Ruggiero, Joseph F.
Boots, shoes, and leggings
364148, 364491, G06F 1520
Patent
active
047180170
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention relates to a method of producing an article bearing, embodying or otherwise displaying a maze-like pattern, and is applicable to a wide range of substances, including ceramic tiles, tiles of synthetic plastics material, textiles and the like. By "pattern" is meant any feature of colour, relief, surface texture, fretwork or the like. By "article" is meant any two-dimensional surface or three-dimensional object capable of bearing, embodying or otherwise displaying the pattern.
It is known that maze-like patterns may be used as a feature both of decoration and interest, and it is the object of the invention to improve the speed and efficiency of the production of master copy for the application of maze-like patterns to a wide range of substrates. In the past, mazes have been generated manually, with the attendant amount of manual labour. Also, in a manually-produced maze, it is not necessarily the case that the route through the maze is a random path, since the draftsman may unconsciously be working within a set of constraints which will introduce regular patterns or topological strategies into the design.
It has also been known to produce mazes by the application of computer programs, but on the one hand such programs as have been used take an exceedingly long time to produce even very small mazes, for example one program takes typically 30 minutes to generate a maze on a 10.times.10 grid. The general reason for this slowness is that the program re-starts whenever a forbidden condition arises, and the forbidden conditions include reaching an outer boundary of the maze before a sufficient pre-determined path length has been achieved, reaching a dead end from which there are no available exit paths, spiralling and, finally, crosssing a previously generated portion of the solution path. Any significant increase in the size of the maze greatly increases the chances that one or other of the forbidden conditions will arrise, and made the program impracticable for the realistic production of large mazes. Another problem is that the existing programs have been designed to generate displays on the monitor screen of the computer, and they are not suited to the production of maze-like patterns of conventional appearance.
The present invention is intended to overcome these problems, and permit the production of maze-like patterns of conventional appearance by an automatic process which results in random patterns in which each point on any of the pathways in the maze can be reached from any other such point.
According to the present invention, a method of manufacturing a pattern-bearing article includes the steps of: incremental steps of a continuous solution path extending from the said starting location to a finishing location and storing the said directions corresponding cells of the array, and array whereby a maze-like pattern is generated, each of the cells of which is configured as a result of testing the contents of a corresponding array cell and its neighbours on two orthogonal sides. fill the whole of the maze with paths, it is preferred, following step (c), of incremental steps of a number of blind paths generated by a process corresponding to that by which step (c) defines the solution path.
In setting up the array it is convenient to arrange that it is larger by two rows and two columns than the intended array. In such a case, initialisation of the array to values not used to define path direction can be used to ensure that the various paths defined in the array are confined within the intended size of the array. In step (d) the additional rows and columns are not utilised to drive the output device. During the performance of step (c) it is preferred at each step to test all adjacent array cells to determine whether the solution path is spiralling inwardly or is about to cross a previously defined portion of the path. Normally, the starting location will be defined at one edge of the maze, while the finishing location will be defined as that point on the opposite edge of the maze at which the s
REFERENCES:
patent: 3974481 (1976-08-01), Ledieu et al.
patent: 4326719 (1982-04-01), Tran et al.
patent: 4484292 (1984-11-01), Hong et al.
patent: 4500953 (1985-02-01), Smith et al.
patent: 4608649 (1986-08-01), Davis et al.
Hutton Geoffrey
Rostron Robert
LandOfFree
Method of producing a pattern-bearing article does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Method of producing a pattern-bearing article, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Method of producing a pattern-bearing article will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-11758