The 85 ways to tie a tie | Hacker News Reader

The 85 ways to tie a tie

tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk

48 pointsDanBC12 comments

Tying a tie is a fairly useless skill but surprisingly it is a skill because it can't really be broken down to a foolproof algorithm.

I have tied a tie almost every weekday of my adult life (granted that is not much grounds for authority as it's probably 10% of the population) and whilst I love those kind of whimsical books I can confidently say that tie classification (and named ties in particular) is not very useful unless you wear one tie and you have to tie it about once every few years when you get married or go to a funeral.

Each tie you own will likely be different in width, length, geometry and hardness but with experience you will know how to always end up with the right length by improvising the moves as you go and evaluate the remaining length and desired rigidity of the knot. Each move has different effects on the knot and you can finish a knot at the correct length regardless of starting point. Otherwise if you just follow the named ties algorithms you'll end up doing trial and error until you find the correct starting point for the tie+knot combination.

I've made some trivial comments on HN but this is probably the longest.

I just up-voted you to an even 1,000.

A very cool paper! But it has in fact been superseded by subsequent research: the actual number of tie-knots is much larger—at least in the tens of thousands. The insights that led to that research on top of the Fink and Mao paper are described in this essay that then uses those ideas to illustrate the idea of language-oriented computer security: https://medium.com/message/necktie-knots-formal-languages-an...

The paper itself is titled, appropriately, More ties than we thought: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-2/

In particular, I like that they produced a random tie knot generator: http://tieknots.johanssons.org/

I feel it's appropriate to link to a Python module I wrote some time ago exploring this book and the systems behind it: https://github.com/subsetpark/necktie

(The link in the read me is unfortunately expired)

Does it feature more recent knots like the Eldredge or Trinity? I wonder how a formal description of the "tricks" they use would look like.

No. Knots like those are the devil because they use the thin end. Also a pain to untie as you can't slide out the widening end easily.

Here's a paper about them: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.8242

And complimentary, 18 ways to tie your shoelaces: http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/knots.htm, Ian's Shoelace Site.

Normally I'd take the number out, but here it's the title of the paper and of the book and of the wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_85_Ways_to_Tie_a_Tie

Why? If it's a disgust with "BuzzFeed-style" headlines, well, the problem with those isn't simply the presence of numbers in them.

If it makes you happy, note that you are following strictly the guidelines:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

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