GIGI Builds · chapters · web extra

The Mesh That Audits Itself

A chapter from GIGI Builds that didn’t fit in print — playable in your browser.

Picture a cube of clay sliced into 384 identical little pyramids — that’s Kuhn’s slicing. Now imagine a sphere hidden inside the cube. Wherever a pyramid touches the sphere, we cut its longest edge in half and repeat — like a mapmaker adding detail only where the coastline is jagged. The tetrahedra hugging the sphere get tiny; the ones out in the corners stay big and lazy.

Each tetrahedron is colored by its shape family — the pattern its six inside-angles make, once you stop caring which corner you labeled first. Two tets pointing different directions but sharing the same angles belong to the same family.

That’s the “audit” part. Every tetrahedron carries its shape data with it — family, quality, sliver margin — so when you ask the mesh “is anything bad in here?” it answers on the spot. No separate analysis pass, no offline check.

Try it
  • Click L0 → L3 to watch cuts happen wherever the sphere hides.
  • Toggle hide top half to peek at what refinement did inside.
  • Switch Color by to obtuse count — green tets have no obtuse dihedral angles; watch the cuts create blue Class 1 tets around the sphere.
  • Drag to spin. Hover any tetrahedron for its exact shape data.
  • The GIGI at work panel shows what the database is doing: connect an engine, click load tetmesh into GIGI, and every click above becomes a real query — real row counts, real latency in milliseconds (plus κ, the engine’s running curvature reading, riding along).

Bonus chapter · GIGI Builds

GIGI AT WORK

The whole tetmesh above lives in GIGI as data. Every tetrahedron becomes one record — 5,760 in total, one per tet across all four refinement levels. Each record carries eight fields: id, level, shape_family, obtuse_class, q_vol (0 = flat sliver, 1 = perfectly regular), d_bad (sliver margin), and the smallest + largest of its six inside-angles.

Because GIGI is a fiber-bundle database, the bundle’s curvature (κ) and confidence ride along with every read — no sidecar service to compute them. When you scrub a level or hover a tet, the log below shows the real GQL query GIGI answered.

not connected — the 3D view is computed in your browser. Connect an engine and this page talks to a real database that stores the mesh the same way GIGI stores everything else: every click becomes a real query.

The mesh, at this level

tetrahedra
shape families found
worst tet quality
sliver margin (worst)
worst tet quality across refinement levels

Flat line = quality holds through all four cuts. Maubach’s rule promises the blue line can’t drop below the yellow one; if it ever did, the theorem broke.

the raw numbers
hide top half
auto-rotate