I’ve always wanted to try out making a 3Blue1Brown-style math video, and this year’s Summer of Math Exposition seemed like the perfect opportunity. Specifically, I wanted to learn the Python library manim for those colorful shapes and smooth animations.
The topic that I picked was combinatorial game theory, specifically the game of Jenga. While not normally thought of as a mathematical game, it turns out that, if both players have perfect coordination, Jenga is actually a particularly simple kind of game called an impartial game, which makes it especially nice to analyze.
The learning curve for using manim was pretty steep, especially since I felt like a video about Jenga required mostly 3D visuals. One day I even decided to try to learn Blender instead for more realistic-looking graphics, but I decided it wasn’t worth continuing after I made this animation.
The deadline for the contest was yesterday, and that was also the day that I did most of the recording. Therefore, most of the voiceover is pretty rough, which really shows up in the final project; if I were to do it again, I would definitely allot more time for editing. Overall, though, I’m just glad I did it! Here’s a link to the video.