Following on from the last idea about magnetic sculpture, how about a grid of easily rotatable magnets, which can swivel perpendicular to their axis. Each magnet will influence the rotation of those around it, and when someone interferes with the magnets on the outside, changes propagate across the grid until a new stable state is reached.
It's like a magnetic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine, with each node attempting to find the lowest "energy". A physical manifestation of a hard computational problem.
That also got me thinking about chain reactions, and how many reversible steps you can set up in a magnetic chain reaction. For example:
- take a set of frictionless tubes, each with a magnet it, in descending length order, with the magnets alternating polarity
- place them parallel, with gradually increasing distance between each other
The magnets should probably go to alternate ends of the tubes. Can you set it up so that moving the first magnet from one side to the other will make all the rest of them switch sides?
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