Wolfram Community members continue to amaze us. Take a look at a few of the fun and clever ideas shared by our members in the first part of 2016.

How to LEGO-fy Your Plots and 3D Models, by Sander Huisman

This marvel by Sander Huisman, a postdoc from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, attracted more than 6,000 views in one day and was trending on Reddit, Hacker News, and other social media channels. Huisman’s code iteratively covers layers with bricks of increasingly smaller sizes, alternating in the horizontal x and y directions. Read the full post to see how to turn your own plots, 3D scans, and models into brick-shaped masterpieces.

Supreme Court Ideological Data, by Alan Joyce

Wolfram’s own Alan Joyce was inspired by a recent New York Times article to use the Wolfram Language to explore Supreme Court ideological data and Martin–Quinn scores. While he leaves you to draw your own political conclusions, his visualizations will help you see the Supreme Court’s decisions in a new way. Get started on your own analysis and join the conversation by grabbing the cleaned-up dataset at the end of his Community post.

Implementing Minecraft in the Wolfram Language, by Boris Faleichik

Fans of Minecraft are going to love this one. With some amazingly compact code, Boris Faleichik, a professor from Belarusian State University and past Wolfram One-Liner Competition winner, shows how the Wolfram Language handles Minecraft’s classic game functionality. Have an idea for an improvement? Visit the post on Community and leave a comment!

Find Your Species Name on Darwin’s Birthday, by Jofre Espigule

To celebrate Darwin’s February 12 birthday, Brainterstellar cofounder Jofre Espigule wrote an app to help you find out if there’s a species that shares your name. It works using the Wolfram Language’s built-in species data. Read the full post to see how Espigule split each scientific name into two words, used the Nearest function to find the species name closest to a given name, and deployed his app to the Wolfram Cloud.

Using Mathematica to See the World in a Different Light, by Marco Thiel

Marco Thiel from the University of Aberdeen celebrated the United Nations’ Year of Light global initiative with an article on how the Wolfram Language, its wealth of data, and connected devices can be used to keep the Year of Light alive at your home. Part 1 explores how spectra enable us to “see the world in a different light.”

Internet of Things (IoT): Controlling an RGB LED with the Wolfram Cloud, by Armeen Mahdian

Thirteen-year-old Armeen Mahdian’s first post on Wolfram Community caught our attention too. He shared how the Wolfram Cloud can be used in conjunction with an embedded Linux device to create IoT applications. Read his full post to see how he used a BeagleBone Black (BBB) and its IO ports to control an RGB LED using the cloud. Don’t miss Mahdian’s other post on PWM pins.

Cops and Robbers (and Zombies and Humans), by Brian Weinstein

Brian Weinstein, data analyst and grad student at Columbia, uses the Wolfram Language to create mathematical pursuit-evasion games. In these games, the goal is to determine how many pursuers are required to capture a given number of evaders. The GIFs he created show two fun versions—Cops and Robbers and Zombies and Humans.

Visit Wolfram Community to join in on these and other interesting discussions and browse the complete list of Staff Picks. Or share and test your own code, ideas, and apps with Community’s more than 11,000 members.