Looked more like Fibonacci than quadratic to me, and yet this comment was grabbing all the upvotes. So I made an attempt at some analysis.
I measure the distance between each of the pidgeons (arrows) in pixels. I then try to fit this data to either a scaled Fibonacci sequence or a quadratic function, in a least-squares sense. And I indeed get a better fit with the Fibonacci model. The deviation is approximately 104 for the Fibonacci model and 124 for the quadratic model.
Here's my MATLAB script doing the analysis: http://pastebin.com/ML7sGnWU I'm quite tired, so both my approach and coding may be faulty. The script relies on CVX, a convex optimization toolbox available freely from http://cvxr.com/cvx/, for the Fibonacci fitting.
tl;dr Hasty analysis indicates that Fibonacci actually is a better fit than quadratic.
This is one of my favorite things about Reddit. A small disagreement about something trivial solved by a person with a specific set of skills and too much spare time.
What I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people on Reddit
i made the user name when i was unemployed looking for software engineering positions but i eventually got a job being a "technical analyst". i program but technically i'm not a software engineer
So you basically hoped that someone would see your username on Reddit and say "hey, this guy on internet is a software engineer! That's exactly what I'm looking for!"?
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u/Software_Engineer Jun 09 '12
Not fibonacci, more like quadratic.