Does an aluminium rod change which printer redesign the penalty-budget search picks?
research/selfrep-alusearch
With an aluminium rod option priced by sag, the penalty-budget search of the printer redesign picks the 12 mm aluminium rod and reaches 40.0% mass closure at budget 2.0 against 33.1% with the wooden rod (41.4% against 35.8% at full budget); the penalty curve is assumed and the metric favours heavy stock; stylised, preliminary.
What it found
A stylised, preliminary search over 448 designs: a rod choice (steel, hardwood or aluminium at 8, 10 or 12 mm) times subsets of six other part substitutions, with a rod penalty tied to mid-span sag by an assumed log curve. At every budget from 0.5 up the best mass-closure design uses the 12 mm aluminium rod: 40.0% at budget 2.0 against 33.1% for the wooden-rod search of selfrep-redesign, and 41.4% against 35.8% at full budget. The choice sits at the assumed holder limit because the closure metric counts heavier bar stock as makeable, so it says little about the best rod. The pick held for penalty scales from 0.05 to 1. Computed only; nothing was built.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.