A domino is a flat, thumbsized block of material either blank or bearing from one to six dots (or pips): 28 such blocks make up a complete set. Dominoes are used to play a variety of games involving the forming of lines and angular structures, as well as for scoring and block-removal. They can also be used to create works of art.
Lily Hevesh started playing with dominoes at age 9. She loved setting them up in straight or curved lines and flicking them to watch them fall, one after another. Hevesh’s hobby soon grew into a career: She’s now a professional domino artist, and she has millions of YouTube followers who watch her create spectacular sets for movies, TV shows, and events.
While Hevesh’s work is impressive, it’s not exactly easy to pull off. It takes a lot of planning to get all the pieces to fit together and be stable. She makes test versions of each section and films them in slow motion to check that they’re working perfectly. And then she assembles the whole thing.
Hevesh uses Domino Data Lab, which she describes as “an end to end data science platform”. She says that it helps her teams work more cohesively by enabling them to collaborate on the same workspace. The tool’s ability to connect to version control systems like bitbucket and spin up interactive workspaces of different sizes — as well as deploy apps and model apis – makes it an indispensable part of her team’s workflow.
Domino also makes it easy to create, explore, and share datasets with your colleagues. The tool offers a number of integrations with popular data analytics platforms and also supports a variety of programming languages. It also integrates with the cloud and has a user-friendly interface.
A Domino Data Lab representative says that the software is especially helpful for data scientists who are looking to automate their workflow. This can save time and reduce mistakes, which are common when working with large amounts of data.
While many domino sets are made of plastic, the traditional European-style ones have been made from materials such as silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (mother of pearl), ivory or a dark wood such as ebony. They may be carved or inlaid with black or white pips. Often, these sets feature the top half thickness of the tiles in MOP or ivory and the lower part in ebony.
Physicist Stephen Morris agrees that dominoes can have potential energy, which is stored based on their position. When a domino is standing upright, much of this energy is converted to kinetic energy when it falls, and this in turn causes other dominoes to topple.
Aside from blocking and scoring, there are many other types of domino games. Some involve a lot of strategy, while others are just pure chance. For example, the Concentration game is a variant of Block, but instead of having two players draw a hand of seven dominoes to determine who plays first, all the players start with a single doublet. Then, for each turn, a player must place one of their tiles adjacent to the first doublet so that it forms a cross with that tile. If they are unable to do so, they must take a sleeping domino from the other players’ hands.