A Structure Out Of Marshmallows And Wooden Sticks
And What I Learned From It
Hi friends,
I live with 2 other structural engineers, and one of them had his birthday recently. 🎉🎉
My flatmate Rafa and me were thinking for over a week about what we can give to Joost (the birthday boy) until we decided to get professional help …
From ChatGPT.
We fed it with something similar to the following prompt: 👇👇
Hi ChatGPT,
please come up with 20 different and fun birthday present ideas for a [age] year old guy. He's active and likes to hang out with his friends. He's also studying structural engineering which he enjoys.Now, it took some chatting with ChatGPT to find a present that we were satisfied with. 💬💬
The main present turned out to be a gift card for paintball.
But ChatGPT gave us some more present ideas which we added to make it more fun.
Joost would only get the “main present” if he answered 6 out of 7 structural engineering-related questions correctly.
And the last (and most difficult 😉😉) question was:
In 2023, two guys set a new world record in applied structural design. They built the tallest truss tower in the world with only 17 marshmallows connecting wooden sticks!
How tall is that tower?
a) 50.2 cm
b) 67.5 cm
c) 75.1 cm
d) 85.1 cmWould you know the answer? 🤔🤔
Here comes the solution. 📺⬇️
Disclaimer: Satire and exaggeration are used in the video. The 2 main characters are aware that they are not one of the best structural engineers. 😎😎This was a fun present for our flatmate, but here are some small learnings from doing it:
The tower had big eccentricities, and it was super hard to avoid them.
Even with huge eccentricities, the structure was very stable because the marshmallows acted more like fixed connections rather than hinges. This made the structure very rigid.
The connections became even stiffer over time, because the marshmallows hardened with time.
Hope this week’s newsletter was entertaining 📺📺 and let me know in the comments, if you want to see more of this type of content. 👍👎