Dominoes are small gaming pieces that you can stack on top of each other in long lines. They have square ends that are either marked with a number of dots or blank. When you push on the first domino in a line, it causes the ones behind it to tip over and so on, until the entire sequence has been completed. This chain reaction has inspired the common phrase, the domino effect, which refers to any event that leads to greater–and sometimes catastrophic–consequences.
Lily Hevesh is a 20-year-old who has made a career out of creating mind-blowing domino sets. She has a YouTube channel where she posts videos of her creations, and she’s even done work for movies, TV shows, and events like the album release for pop star Katy Perry.
Hevesh says she started playing with dominoes as a kid. Her grandparents had a set of 28 dominoes, and she loved setting them up in straight or curved lines and flicking them over to see the whole row fall.
When Hevesh designs a new set, she follows a version of the engineering-design process. First she considers the theme or purpose of the installation, and then she brainstorms ideas for images or words that might relate to it. Once she has a rough idea for the design, she creates a prototype.
She says the most important part of a domino set is making sure the layout is open for play. This means that no additional tiles can be placed on the short or long sides of a double, and that any tiles that are already there can only be played against. This limits what other players can do to influence the outcome of a game.
Once Hevesh has her prototype, she tests it to make sure it works as intended. Then, she starts laying the dominoes down in a line, starting with the one that has the most spots (depending on the rules of the game, this may be determined by drawing lots or by which player holds the heaviest hand). As she plays her dominoes, she tries to score points by connecting them to other tiles.
As the first domino falls, most of its potential energy converts to kinetic energy, which provides the push needed to knock over the next domino. Some of that kinetic energy is transmitted to the next domino, which in turn provides the push needed for the next, and so on. The last domino to fall wins the game.
Domino’s was founded by Peter Monaghan in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1967. The company began a major expansion in the 1970s, opening locations near college campuses and targeting young adults who wanted pizza quickly and easily. Monaghan also emphasized the importance of technology to his business model, and that has helped keep Domino’s on the cutting edge in how people can order pizza.
Domino is a centralized platform for managing code, data, and results. It keeps snapshots of projects as they run, including the code and data files that were used to generate them. When a project finishes, Domino links all the results together as a “Run” — this makes it easy for anyone to trace from a result back to the code and data that generated it. This approach also enables Domino to serve the models as REST API endpoints for external consumers, or to build lightweight self-service web forms that let internal stakeholders run and modify a model at will.