The Heiwa Challenge

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Anti-sophist said:
Let's say 40 toothpicks, 4 per brick. And 80 connections, glue, gluing the toothpick to both the brick and the steel.
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  • Stuff the model with cotton to simulate the flammable contents of the floors.
  • Shoot a .410Ga shotgun round into the model to simulate the damage of the airplane impact.
  • Add weight proportional to 100 tons in one corner of one floor to simulate the excess and unplanned floor loading of the aircraft debris.
  • Squirt lighter fluid into the model and set fire inside the model to simulate the resulting fire.
  • If the model is still standing, drop Part A onto Part C or whatever stupid nomenclature Heiwa uses to try to explain his theory.

To quote one of the people involved on the design the WTC towers:

Recently, Henry Guthard, 70, one of Yamasaki's original partners who also worked as the project manager at the [WTC] site, said, "To hit the building, to disappear, to have pieces come out the other side, it was amazing the building stood. To defend against 5,000 (sic) gallons of ignited fuel in a building of 1350 feet is just not possible.

http://snurl.com/j54gc (Bottom of page 188)
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Anti-sophist said:
Let's say 40 toothpicks, 4 per brick. And 80 connections, glue, gluing the toothpick to both the brick and the steel.




Structure is only considered crushed, when >70% of the elements in part A are disconnected from each other after test, i.e. drop by part C on A.




If this was built, and if it collapsed as I've stated, does this satisfy your challenge?
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So we have the following elements; 4 steel rods with holes, 10 (or 11) bricks, and 40 toothpicks. There are total 80 (or 84) glued connections.

70% of the connections must fail, i.e. 56 or so.

Have a try! Purpose is to see if part C can one-way crush down part A. Maybe only one connection (of eight) will fail at first impact, then top brick of part A displaces at one corner, part C will be pushed to that side and maybe a few more connections fail. But not 56!

So to start with, ensure that all eight top connections steel rod/toothpick/brick fails similtaneously. If only four connections fail - 50% - you are off to a bad start.

Maybe with luck, you may break 40 connections in part A, but any time you break one connection there is another with no load acting on it. Difficult to break that one.

I have a feeling a lot of toothpicks will remain attached to rods or bricks after your attempt.

Why not glue the bricks to the steel rods and forget the toothpicks? Then there are only 40 or 44 connections to break and you must only break 28 or 30 for success.

Don't forget the lateral load check prior crush down test!
 
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Heiwa said:
I have a feeling a lot of toothpicks will remain attached to rods or bricks after your attempt.
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I would expect better from a "good European" and an engineer.

If you are having problems with the terms you stated in your o/p, then please re-state them in the light of experience you have gained through the responses in this thread. At the moment you are in breach of contract, to put it in legal terms.

10. Structure is only considered crushed, when >70% of the elements in part A are disconnected from each other after test, i.e. drop by part C on A.

"Element" in your o/p cannot be considered to include joints, but purely the structural members that are connected by the joints. Whether a toothpick snaps or pulls out in its entirety is not a consideration in the o/p. To illustrate - if I screw together two pieces of wood, I have two elements (the pieces of wood). Expecting the screw also to detach when breaking this joint would be plain bizarre. If the two pieces come apart, I have 100% "disconnected" status. Agreed?
 
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Gamolon said:
Good point. He tried to pull the same schtick with me when I proposed my model.

Heiwa, here is my model that I am going to use and beat your challenge.

How about this model.

Let's take a 25lb weight used for weight lifting. The round weights with a hole in the middle that can be slipped onto a weight lifting bar. Lets get 6, 1" diameter wooden dowels and pound them into the ground around the perimeter of the weight mentioned above. Let's take a single 1" diameter wooden dowel and pound it into the ground in the center of the ring we just created.

Now let's slip one of the 25lb weights mentioned onto the center wooden dowel down to about an inch from the ground. We'll put one thumbtack (the kind with the plastic head on them, not the flat heads) in each of the perimeter wooden dowels right below the weight and put two thumbtacks, opposite one another on the center wooden dowel.

We'll build our tower up 40 feet high with a "floor" weight every foot.

We'll then created a seperate section the same way, but only 1/10th the size, which would be 4 weights (or 100lbs). We will then position the 1/10th section above the 40 foot tower we created using a dowel to center it above.

We then drop the 1/10th section down the centering dowel from a height of 10 feet above.

What do you think would happen? Are the "thumbtack" connections going to arrest the upper part and stop it from bringing everything down the the ground?
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OK, here we have a nice structure with say n discs with mass held by a center pole? Every disc is attached to the pole via only one connection. .

Now we cut the pole to get two parts A and C. Upper part C consists of n/10 discs attached to a pole, which is 1/10th of the original pole.

Part A is evidently the rest; 9n/10 disc connected to a pole 9/10th of the original one.

Now drop part C on part A. First contact will be between the two poles!

What happens? Well pole C applies a force on pole A that transmits the force to ground. Pole A also applies a force on pole C that is stopped ... I assume. Or it will tumble on the side.

When pole C stops/tumbles on its side, maybe connections between C discs/pole break and the C discs start falling down. I doubt very much that the C-discs will break off all A discs. The C pole is not centered on A any more!

Remember that parts A and C must have same structures, incl. pole, etc, etc.
 
Heiwa, where's your million dollars?

Do you actually have it or are you full of you-know-what?

Documentation please.
 
alienentity said:
Heiwa, where's your million dollars?

Do you actually have it or are you full of you-know-what?

Documentation please.
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For sure I have $1M but this thread is not about money; it is a challenge! Try to beat it. Produce a structure that self-destructs by dropping a piece of it on it. You'll get rich! Patent it.
Most contenders have not read the rules! They design a structure A and then take another structure C and drop on A. They have not understood that they should disconnect a part of A - that we call part C - and then drop this part on A.
They do a Bazant!! Bazant says that a part C of WTC 1 dropped on the lower part A and - simsalabim - C one-way crushed down A. However, the Bazant part C is not the real upper part of WTC 1. It is a superstrong monster that Bazant has invented ... probably for money.
 
Heiwa said:
So we have the following elements; 4 steel rods with holes, 10 (or 11) bricks, and 40 toothpicks. There are total 80 (or 84) glued connections.

70% of the connections must fail, i.e. 56 or so.

Have a try! Purpose is to see if part C can one-way crush down part A. Maybe only one connection (of eight) will fail at first impact, then top brick of part A displaces at one corner, part C will be pushed to that side and maybe a few more connections fail. But not 56!

So to start with, ensure that all eight top connections steel rod/toothpick/brick fails similtaneously. If only four connections fail - 50% - you are off to a bad start.

Maybe with luck, you may break 40 connections in part A, but any time you break one connection there is another with no load acting on it. Difficult to break that one.

I have a feeling a lot of toothpicks will remain attached to rods or bricks after your attempt.
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Ok, I think I understand now. You consider the "toothpicks" to be a component, when they are just part of the connection mechanism. Toothpicks are no different than a screw, nail, or rivet, in this scenario. I've used them simply to use a "connection" component of the same order of magnitude strength as is required, instead of something like pure glue which is 1000s of time stronger than is accurate, relative to scale.

The toothpick breaks before the glue because its weaker than the glue. You dodge the issue completely by making the toothpick a "component" instead of a failed connection.

Your goal is "break" the adhesives.. and you are hiding behind the fact that at these scales, adhesives are infinitely stronger than the force that can be generated. In other words, you've changed the game from anything to have anything to do with 9/11 and more it's a game of finding an adhesive that is "just" strong enough to hold something up. This is an easy problem for me to dodge, but let me start with another question.

If I built the structure above, and dropped the top brick, and every single toothpick in the structure shattered... leaving us with

* 4 rods with half-toothpicks stuck out of them...
* 10 bricks with half-toothpicks stuck out of them...

...all strewn out on the floor... You wouldn't consider this a "collapse" of the building valid of winning your challenge? You don't think this demonstrates fairly conclusively that a less than 10% of the mass, dropped from a modest height, can destroy an entire structure? Really?

Second question, here's a simple modification. Instead of toothpicks and glue, I use a tiny bit of clay. It will harden and be extremely brittle, but it will connect the bricks to the steel rods. When I drop the top brick, it will shatter the clay connections and it will progress to the floor, shattering all of the connections. Will this result in a successful experiment? Will this satisify the challenge?

Produce a structure that self-destructs by dropping a piece of it on it.
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My structure does this. Despite the fact that my structure is lying on the floor completely and utterly demolished with no "floor" connected to any "column", you say it's not "destroyed". Your definition of "destroyed" needs work, I think.
 
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Anti-sophist said:
... let me start with another question.

AA. If I built the structure above, and dropped the top brick, and every single toothpick in the structure shattered... leaving us with

* 4 rods with half-toothpicks stuck out of them...
* 10 bricks with half-toothpicks stuck out of them...

...all strewn out on the floor... You wouldn't consider this a "collapse" of the building valid of winning your challenge? You don't think this demonstrates fairly conclusively that a less than 10% of the mass, dropped from a modest height, can destroy an entire structure? Really?

BB. Second question, here's a simple modification. Instead of toothpicks and glue, I use a tiny bit of clay. It will harden and be extremely brittle, but it will connect the bricks to the steel rods. When I drop the top brick, it will shatter the clay connections and it will progress to the floor, shattering all of the connections. Will this result in a successful experiment? Will this satisify the challenge?



CC. My structure does this. Despite the fact that my structure is lying on the floor completely and utterly demolished with no "floor" connected to any "column", you say it's not "destroyed". Your definition of "destroyed" needs work, I think.
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AA. The idea is to disconnect 1/10th (part C) of the structure and drop it on the other 9/10th (part A). If your 1/10th part C is just one brick, the other 9/10th part A are 9 bricks stacked on top of each other and evidently one brick cannot one-way crush down the nine.

If you attach the bricks to steel rods you have to ensure that also the steel rods are parts of both C and A.

BB. Fine - use clay to connect the bricks and the steel rods. And do the lateral load check, etc. Your clay/rod/brick design looks like a house of cards to me and is not a real structure.

CC. I think you should re-read post #1 to get an idea what the Challenge is all about.
 
Heiwa said:
For sure I have $1M <snip>
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Documentation please...... still waiting Heiwa.

You claim to have the $1M (USD or Euros?). Is this a con game or for real?

You surely must have the money in trust, or should be able to get your bank or lawyer verify that the funds are in place.
 
Tips to meet The Heiwa Challenge

Here are some extracts from the BLGB paper to assist designers of a Heiwa Challenge structure:

Merely to get convinced of the inevitability of gravity driven progressive collapse, further analysis is, for a structural engineer, superfluous. Further analysis is nevertheless needed to dispel false myths, and also to acquire full understanding that would allow assessing the danger of progressive collapse in other situations.

The gravity-driven progressive collapse of a tower consists of two phases—the crush-down, followed by crush-up (Fig. 2 bottom), each of which is governed by a different differential equation (Bazant and Verdure 2007, pp. 312-313). During the crush-down, the falling upper part of tower (C in Fig. 2 bottom), having a compacted layer of debris at its bottom (zone B), is crushing the lower part (zone A) with negligible damage to itself. During the crush-up, the moving upper part C of tower is being crushed at bottom by the compacted debris B resting on the ground.
…

It is found that, immediately after the first critical story collapses, crush fronts will propagate both downwards and upwards. However, the crush-up front will advance into the overlying story only by about 1% of its original height h and then stop. Consequently, the effect of the initial two-way crush is imperceptible and the hypothesis that the crush-down and crush-up cannot occur simultaneously is almost exact.
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Fig. 2 is below:

Bazantnew.JPG


So you see that you have to ensure that the crush-up front does not destroy upper part C structure at impact. So part C structure must be strong!

OK, part A structure is even stronger, as it carried part C before, and part C carried nothing, so you have to consider that.

Then you have to ensure that the crush-down front displaces uniformly down through part A structure and produces rubble (part B).

How that is done is The Heiwa Challenge!

Even if part C structure is only damaged 1%, you have to ensure that it is uniform! If not part C may slide off and there is no one-way crush down of part A structure.

Evidently you have to ensure that part A does not arrest part C. That's part of the Challenge.

Of course, The Heiwa Challenge is a superfluous excersize according Bazant but have a try anyway. Good luck!
 
From The Heiwa Challenge
heiwa said:
see post #1 above.

Btw i'll pay you $1m if you can produce a structure that can be crushed like that. Suteki desu ne!? Get working!
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HEIWA CONFESSES TO BENTHAM OPEN JOURNALIST NO MONEY TO PAY HEIWA CHALLENGE WINNERS.
CHALLENGE TRUST MILLIONS LOST TO MADOFF
 
Heiwa said:
For sure I have $1M but this thread is not about money; it is a challenge!
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It is supposedly a challenge where you say "i'll pay you $1m" for meeting the conditions.

(1) Do you offer to pay someone who meets the criteria of the first post $1 million in US dollars?

(2) How soon after a successful demonstration will you pay?

(3) In what form will the funds be transferred?

(4) Will you agree to put the money into escrow so that a third party can administer the funds?

(5) Will you agree to a third party arbitrator or judge to decide whether the challenge has been met?

(6) If not, do you agree to make the determination yourself in good faith, using the terms in your first post in this thread in their commonly-understood meanings in everyday English?

(7) In the event of a claimed breach, will you accept the home district and state of the challenger (U.S. District Court) as proper venue and jurisdiction for the filing of a lawsuit and agree to appear if necessary?

(8) Will you make that agreement in writing, using your real name?
 
NoZed Avenger said:
It is supposedly a challenge where you say "i'll pay you $1m" for meeting the conditions.
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Did I? Where? The Heiwa Challenge is a no money/just honour challenge. Just design and build a structure where C, when dropped on A, one-way crushes down A, etc, etc.

In another thread I offered $1M to selected anonumous persons to prove this theoretically as encouragement to move forward. None of these lucky persons produced any theories at all!

One person 'Alpha Bravo' actually produced an interesting paper, C dropping on A in 1-D, where both C and A were n and 10 n material points respectively connected by 'potentials' (elastic springs); the C chain with n material pointes was 'free' and the A chain with 10 n material points was connected to rigid ground at one end. At contact C/A at various energies both C and A deform elastically and, as A is fixed at one end, A may deform locally more than C in the time following contact. Alpha Bravo then suggested that a 'potential' in A may fail before any 'potential' in C. If that means that a one-way crush down of A follows is not yet decided.

You see there are 11 n material points and 'potentials' and if one 'potential' fails anywhere ... the material points above just slides off and falls to ground ... in 2-D! No one way crush down of A - just C falling to ground.

So in 2-D a one-way crush down is not possible. We are now working on a 3-D model where a one-way crush down is really impossible.

Any comments are always welcome.
 
Something I just thought about Heiwa.

How can you explain the South Tower?? It had about 1/3rd of the total building fall. So, does that mean that if we use 1/3rd of the buidlings mass, than it counts as a one way crush down???

Im just curious. Would you agree that if we use 1/3 instead of 1/10th, (which, BTW, is actually WRONG considering the impact zone started at the 93rd floor) then it COULD happen, right??

Oh, one last thing. Why in all of your models and rantings, do you use 1/10?? If that alone is fundamentally wrong, why do you continue using it???
 
triforcharity said:
Something I just thought about Heiwa.

How can you explain the South Tower?? It had about 1/3rd of the total building fall. So, does that mean that if we use 1/3rd of the buidlings mass, than it counts as a one way crush down???

Im just curious. Would you agree that if we use 1/3 instead of 1/10th, (which, BTW, is actually WRONG considering the impact zone started at the 93rd floor) then it COULD happen, right??

Oh, one last thing. Why in all of your models and rantings, do you use 1/10?? If that alone is fundamentally wrong, why do you continue using it???
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The Challenge uses 1/10th quite arbitrarily to get the discussion started (as Bazant uses it in his reports). You can use 1/3rd, if you like! It doesn't really matter. A smaller piece of any structure dropped on a bigger piece of similar structure cannot one-way crush down the bigger piece.
 
Ok, thanks. I was just thinking about that today. Maybe I'll have to build something, I got some vacation coming up.....
 
triforcharity said:
Ok, thanks. I was just thinking about that today. Maybe I'll have to build something, I got some vacation coming up.....
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triforcharity .... it seems Heiwa is suggesting 49% falling onto 51% will always leave the odd 2% standing. He also has stated that it doesn't matter whether the 49% falls from one storey or 2 miles.

Be warned :D Model at your peril! Please follow all health+safety guidelines. Glue goalposts firmly in place at the outset.
 
Part A (Heiwa's brain) is crushed down by Part C (about 5 million posts explaining to him why his argument is that of a yoghurt pot with learning problems)

Who would have guessed that a yoghurt pot was so resilient to reason? Why, everyone. He is, after all, made of plastic. (Supposed decomposition rate for Heiwa's empty carton : over 100 years. Supposed irritation rate for average debunker telling him to **** off back to nursery school: 15 minutes.)
 
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