Don't get hung up on "14 year old". Pay attention to "took up origami 6 years ago". That's 6 years of passionate learning, experimenting and improvement.
Also, ‘years’ tend to be a lot more hours for kids, and each hour yields more learning due to neuroplasticity. I learned so much faster at 15 than I do at 35. I know more now, which often more than makes up for slower learning, but I can’t learn difficult novel subjects in depth as fast as I once did.
I’m glad I learned OS in depth during high school via Gentoo linux. And engineering/physics/math in college. It’s very easy to assimilate any new knowledge which can be understood through those areas of first principles.
But learning more advanced math is quite a task now.
Can you really say that unless you switched fields multiple times? Of course you'll pick up on math and physics faster in high school than in college or postgrad, but that's because the problems get way, way harder as you progress. I've found that even in my late 30s I can still easily pick up new skills outside my field of expertise as long as I start with the basics that could also be picked up by a high-schooler. I started learning a new language last year and thanks to modern study apps, I actually find it easier today. Of course it will still take a long time to become an expert, but I'm not sure it would need more total hours than if I had started 20 years ago. It just gets more difficult to allocate the necessary hours for learning.
> even in my late 30s I can still easily pick up new skills outside my field of expertise as long as I start with the basics that could also be picked up by a high-schooler
Same age and same experience. I am learning my third language, after acquiring my second to a fluent level in my early 30's (by living in a country where it's spoken). But it's an entirely different character set, and has nearly zero cognates. I'm sure some skills transferred from my second language learning but I'm massively enjoying it and don't feel bogged down.
I think a lot of it is managing my mental energy, I look at it as a finite per-day resource replenished by sleep. If I have a mentally heavy workday, or overly emotional day, I know my language skills will be sub-par and don't try too hard. I also approach my learning in the morning, when I have an excess of this energy, because my job will do a good job of getting it close to zero, regardless of the starting point.
I think we don't give enough credence to the mental toll of an adult life and corporate job, and how much that takes from us, versus when we were young.
Totally of the same persuasion as you, I'll say I did hear a very good counter point when Magnus Carlsen said in an interview at 30 he feels he can't compute lines as deep as he could previously, and his edge is now his experience. That was rather convincing.
Most of the folklore around "neuroplasticity" I've found pretty underwhelming. But yeah, if even he says it at that level of consistent practice, that seems like a good yardstick.
As I've experienced getting older I've found it's more about the lack of available time and focus.
I don't have the hours of time a young person does and I don't have the focus, there are a lot of other thoughts, emotions and responsibilities competing for my attention.
Would love someone who's aware of the literature to throw their hat in the ring though.
I think it's just because hours spent learning by children often don't look like work to us. Like, when children are watching children's television or looking through those baby books with shapes and colors, they are studying. To them, that is learning. And I guarantee that in 1 hour of studying, I can learn every single color in Spanish, whereas a baby might need months of daily reading to finally understand it. But because we don't register it as studying, we would still say the baby learned language "effortlessly", while adults need to "study".
> Can you really say that unless you switched fields multiple times?
I have ;-) far too many times! Even going back and taking undergrad math coursework that my engineering curriculum didn't have like Discrete Math or Statistics got a lot harder than calculus / differential equations was when I was younger. I felt like I got less out of each hour, and also couldn't put in as many hours - not just because I have more responsibilities, but also because my brain just gets tired after fewer hours.
Have you tried creatine supplements? Especially if you're vegan or don't eat a lot of meat. Most people take it for muscle performance, but I found it insanely helpful for maintaining a sharp mind throughout a long day, especially with little sleep. That's also what the latest research starts to appreciate. I wouldn't be surprised to see recommended doses above 10g/day in elderly soon-ish since there are basically zero downsides even at much higher doses. In my early 30s I thought I lost my ability to pull all nighters because of increased tiredness, but now I feel like I can do even more than when I was 18. Most people greatly underestimate diet in general because they used to get away with anything when they were young.
its 60-70% time and energy from lifestyle, financial security (subconscious anxiety),
someone like peter steinger can sit at home experimenting for hours and learn+create vastly more at the age of 48 than the average 30 year old
But, if you compare outright performance, the brain like any other part of the body is at its biological peak function in the late teens. Rachmaninov wrote most of his work as a teenager. mozart wrote first at age 8. zuckerberg create fb in undergrad. the youthful organism is full of vitality and ease
I'd argue I learn much faster now. I did study math and physics but I've found that those tools have accelerated a lot of learning and have a lot of compounding effects. Maybe mileage may vary but I suspect a strong base allows one to learn even faster.
Though only in last few years did I realize I was a fast learner. I thought I was slow because I'd say I didn't understand unless I had a deep understanding. But found that where I would not feel comfortable claiming understanding was a different threshold than others.
Where I've found math and physics helpful is in depth and abstraction. The science builds a good framework to dive deep into understanding and tease out the critical components. Science is a search algorithm in some sense. The math helps abstract, or generalize. To see the patterns and extend and use in ways beyond what was taught. That's where the real compounding happens and where I personally start to feel I understand things. But it requires the depth. But that's my framework and I'm sure there's a million good ones and a million better ones
Math and physics certainly allow you to learn fast in technical fields and that is my experience as well, but the other comment was more about completely unrelated fields like humanities where previous experience may not translate at all. For example an english speaker with a PhD in Physics will still have to start more or less from zero when learning japanese.
Try something completely different from your field of expertise. For a typical nerd, this might be motor skills like in gymnastics. My experience is this takes a very long time to learn.
> I've found that even in my late 30s I can still easily pick up new skills outside my field of expertise as long as I start with the basics that could also be picked up by a high-schooler.
this was rather famously the technique of Jonas Salk to learn and master things, switch fields every so often, giving you a wide base of disciplines to apply to new fields.
I've never understood this belief. There are many things I struggled with as a child that are very easy for me to understand now. For instance, calculus. I struggled barely passing my classes originally. A few years ago I decided that I really needed to know calculus so I bought a book and worked through all the problems. Not only was it not difficult but the whole thing just made logical sense; it was all straightforward.
I can believe there are some things that would take me longer as an adult to learn than if I were a child (a new language for instance) but origami folding wouldn't be one of them.
> and each hour yields more learning due to neuroplasticity
I don't think that's true. As an extreme example, it takes a newborn a couple of years before they can start speaking a language; an adult can learn a few basic phrases in an hour or so.
I don't know - i'm 33 ~ now - recently with AI learning is much easier - don't get me wrong I definitely won't say that the brain does not slow down - but I'd definitely argue that we have advantages over kids - be it discipline, knowing how to learn ; and stuff like that - for example let's take coq which is I suppose one of the hardest thing we can learn - you can decompose it in ways myself as a kid or as a 20yo wouldn't even be able to. What I mean is that there is a lot of complexities or stuff i would get stuck upon that I just fly over today and know I'm alright - much better ability to focus in a sense
I wonder if everyone who said it was a lot easier for them to learn when they were younger aren’t factoring in their increased responsibilities as an adult.
I know when I’m actually able to sit quietly to study something, I’m able to pick it up fairly quickly. (One thing going for me is I’m much better able to sit still as an adult than a kid, ha.) But yeah, having to juggle work responsibilities for 8-9 hours a day and then having to also manage a bunch of things I didn’t have to think as hard about when I was younger (bills, cleaning, pets), I definitely just don’t have as much time to dedicate towards focused studying like that.
As far as I'm aware, this is not true at all. Adults actually learn considerably faster per hour spent, it's simply that most adults don't have as much time to dedicate to learning as kids do. This is confirmed both by studies as well as intuition — you get better at most things as you do more of it, studying is the same.
I wonder if it may depend on the type of learning.
Whether it's something completely new and alien - in which case children might be better, or whether it's learning through association - ie I understand that because I can connect it to previously learnt concepts ( which would favour people with more previous knowledge ).
For example, something like maths is often seen as a young persons game, but at the same time you probably don't want a 14 yr old running your company.
Gentoo is what really made Linux click for me, too. I'm still very, very glad for that and remain a loyal user to this day!
Although I've had to restrict it to the 2 desktop machines. Maybe I should give it a shot again on the laptops, now that binary packages are universally available...
Also don't get hung up on "folded". He hasn't innovated a design (it was invented by a Japanese astrophysicist, Miura-Ori), merely measured sustainable load across different designs.
Don't get hug up on "invented". Ruth Asawa registered for (1956) and received US patent 185,504 on June 16, 1959 at the suggestion of her professor, Buckminster Fuller.
You can even spend time and money to acquire a patent and it still doesn’t guarantee profit. It’s called the Miura-ori even though it was patented decades earlier. In this case, the patent acts as a record emphasizing that it’s all been done before.
Don't get hung up on "14 years old". It's a classic journalist trop designed to get you to read their paper without putting too much weight on the actual content which is a paper thin, pun intended, PR fluff thing for The Society for Science. The prize is not even linked to the origami but on-site team challenges in a final event.
The origami is Miura-ori fold by the way and they are already used in plenty of fields. Fairly interesting stuff from the 60s. Would have made for a great article.
The kids tested some paper configurations and specific fold patterns. Really impressive stuff considering it was totally impossible to do with computer simulation and hasn't been studied to death in aerospace. Neat science fair project, awful headline.
I was actually wondering why haven't the computational geometry and shape optimization people found these structures so far. I would expect us to at least know these shapes or category of shapes.
Getting it via origami is art and a testimony to wonders of intuition and observational learning, but getting the shapes could be done by other methods.
You should pay attention to the fact that his parents are rich and educated enough to figure out submarine marketing for him. Winning a major national level science fair plays a pretty big role in college admissions and having the press trumpet his achievements ensures that he will have an easier path to get future internships and other type of prestigious if-you-know-you-know type of positions (who knows, maybe he might apply to YC too in a few years).
To be fair, how many kids of rich parents spend time in doing experiments similar to this? Reading the article, I think he is naturally talented & motivated (& not targeting college admissions).
> isn't this more a trait of autism than anything else?
No. It’s a sign of drive and discipline.
The latter, specifically the focus element, overlaps with autism. But more broadly it does not. (There are a lot of impressive teenagers applying themselves diligently to impressive ends. Most of them are not on the spectrum, though I suspect mild autism is slightly over-represented in that set.)
You're assuming that autism is always going to be a disadvantage. In fact, the obsessive focus mirrors scientific practice. Good luck to him, I respect him.
The key here is scale. What works in inches often falls apart at feet. The structure is holding about 33 psi over the area (which is rigidly supported from below), much more along the contact edges. By comparison balsa wood can support significantly more pressure (varies, but well over 100psi) but doesn’t concentrate pressure on edges.
Is there anything useful about this? Maybe as an inexpensive(?) core for high strength skins?
Note that boxes may get pressure from all the sides(different kind of pressure & movements during shipping), not just from the top as seen in the images (or shelters) in the article.
I think the goal would be not to make the whole box out of this structure, but to scale this structure down to be 4 millimeters high and use is as the core of the cardboard (or corrugated fibreboard as it's known in the industry).
I loaded semis for UPS in the summer of 1967 in Milwaukee, between my first and second years of college. I worked 4 hour shifts at night, 6-10 pm, M-F. Hard job. Paid very well. Deep inside the trucks the temperature and humidity were so high me and my partner had to shift roles every 15 minutes, one of us outside the back of the truck selecting packages off the belt that ran along the back of all the trucks in the loading bay and the other inside the truck, pulling them off the long elevated metal roller-topped structure that extended from the back belt at the back of the truck to the front of the semi.
When the outside temperature was 90° and up, it was insanely hot 30 feet deep inside the trucks with no air circulation: we wore gloves and shorts. The noise also was incredibly loud, deafening. Toward the end of our shifts we were semi-delirious and exhausted and so we just threw the rapidly incoming packages over our heads back into the truck instead of stacking them as was proper.
So the damage was likely done long before the delivery person took it the last few feet.
> The key here is scale. What works in inches often falls apart at feet
Does that mean we could increase the orders of magnitude if we made it smaller? Lots of tiny stuff needs mechanical support. And lots of folded small things agglomerated is another way to say biology.
Yes, the math is probably somewhat similar to what carpenters use to determine if a tabletop will sag as a function of its length: https://woodbin.com/calcs/sagulator/
Obviously not the same because the force isn't being applied perpendicular to the edges, but still, almost certainly will be not nearly linear.
Closer to "mineralogy", plenty of things are both smaller and tougher (on this "support its own weight" metric) than cells or proteins with their squishy folding rules.
Even if we include things like hydroxyapatite in teeth, or even lignin, those are more like byproducts of biology than active biology itself.
> plenty of things are both smaller and tougher (on this "support its own weight" metric) than cells or proteins with their squishy folding rules
I was thinking microscopic versus nanoscale. Folding something out of a flat material is probably cheaper than machining it, and if it's stronger than additively manufacturing it you have applications in medical devices and aerospace for starters.
Microscopic is unnecessary. Tessellation is already used in space and medical devices (not mentioned in this article: it's used in devices like stents). The specific fold being used here is named after an astrophysicist and has already been used in space.
> a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight
> Wu was especially intrigued by the Miura-ori fold, named after its inventor, the Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura. Famed for its use in aeronautical engineering, the fold has been leveraged to make solar panels for spacecraft and satellites. One of its earliest space applications was in Japan’s Space Flyer Unit, a satellite launched in 1995.
Directly: no, the end of the article has a nice list of reasons why, somewhat hidden
(ex. "Actual shelters...need to respond to multidirectional loads" = these were tested with load in one direction)
Miles, if you're reading this, it's useful. You're already doing what .1% of people do. I call them journeys and emphasize they're a million steps without clear direction, and if you're lucky, maybe positive feedback along the way. You're just on step N < 1,000,000. This works out, in some way, you already know it's not literally "yes this is sooo useful that we should start autofolding it at 1000x scale". It will work out. maybe as exactly this, this with some tweaks, or the $25K helps you do $X, or the publicity helps you do $Y.
This is very cool, but I don't really see the direct connection between a paper structure which is very strong in compression and emergency accommodation (which the article really focuses on).
Tents don't need to be strong in compression - there's no weight on the roof. And obviously paper is not a material that scales up or would be practical for outdoor use.
Just a bit confused by the obvious mismatch here - maybe it's the journalist putting more weight on the disaster application than the kid did.
This is a problem with our science funding system. We really discourage pure research, so everything needs to be justified in terms of saving lives or helping to cure cancer. He'll make a good academic someday.
100% this. There's nothing wrong with focusing on first principles and this is a rediscovery in that matter.
It's just an acknowledgement that the Miura pattern works and this kid kept his focus. To be perfectly honest, he just took something that was already done before (the fold) and applied it. Scientists do this all the time and win prizes--like cellophane tape to create graphene.
We never know when the result of pure research will have applications. Maybe his findings would have material impact 20 years from now in a field we are unable to foresee today.
> tents don't need to be strong in compression - there's no weight on the roof
But there is on the floor, unless you expect the inhabitants to sleep more or less directly on the ground, including themselves, whatever is used as a mattress, belongings, small appliances, etc. Emergency habitation is not the same as a camping tent, it needs to be able to service populations that have difficulty with camping's limitations, like the elderly.
> Paper is not a material that scales up
Citation needed? It's made from a renewable resource (wood) and there's some 400+ million metric tons of paper production yearly (source: Gemini, so feel free to take with a grain of salt).
> Or would be practical for outdoor use
If exposed directly to the elements, sure. But what if the paper is laminated or otherwise enclosed within plastic, rubber, or other synthetic material well-recognized as hydrophobic?
>Citation needed? It's made from a renewable resource (wood) and there's some 400+ million metric tons of paper production yearly (source: Gemini, so feel free to take with a grain of salt).
Sorry, I meant in the sense of physical scale - I wouldn't imagine the properties of paper at 50cm scale translate directly to say 5 or 10 metre scale.
Most tents are in fact not very strong in compression unless designed for snow. If you do get a big snow you need to wake up in the night and remove the snow so it doesn't crush the tent.
I remember cutting an IKEA desk top down one side and discovering the inside was just corrugated cardboard under a few layers of laminate. it was trivial to break by shearing it but in a typical construction where the weight is mostly up/down it was obviously sufficient - until you cut the rigid sides off that is...
While this probably does have incredible Z-axis strength, I can't imagine it being very strong with any kind of lateral loads.
This design is terrible for desks, they all end up sagging after a few years of use. Their "SANDSBERG" kitchen table is a much better choice for a desk, no cardboard and metal reinforced
It’s cardboard covered with a thin layer of plastic and wood. People buying this aren’t doing it for longevity. It’s so they can spend $15 on a side table for their college dorm.
I like the idea of not buying disposable furnitures, especially when there are alternatives at the same price. I can stand on my current desk (the ikea kitchen table) with my full weight and probably jump on it, the previous one was bowing if I did as little as resting my elbows on it
There's something about this that stands out as very concerning for me.
This, clearly very clever, young man is 14 years old. The article says: "Wu had always been fascinated with the ancient Japanese art of origami, but he really began indulging in it as a hobby about six years ago."
At eight. He was *indulging* in a hobby at eight years old. Indulging in a hobby should be a pre-retirement activity. What an incredible weight the attitude of the writer puts on kids.
I've heard/read the expression "to indulge in a hobby" many times and never thought it was pejorative or paints hobbies as extravagancies. If you google indulge hobby, there's plenty of hits. Strangely though, ChatGPT says it does sound negative. It had never occurred to me, and probably not to the author.
I apologise for you misunderstanding my example as a strict definition?
For anyone who hasn't understood my meaning:
Indulge is a word that implies that you're allowing yourself something that you might not ordinarily. The point being: it is (or should be) silly to suggest that a child can be said to indulge in a hobby. This is because the further implication is that an eight year old might show some restraint and focus on their book learning and networking.
I'd argue that kids should be generalist, as in learning diverse set of experiences rather than spending years honing a single craft. This is peak time where brain can quick adapt to new novel problems (like language learning) and spending this time to perfect a single niche feels counter-productive if not straight unethical. Kids should only specialize when they become grown enough to idependently decide on what they want to do.
I think about this sometimes. On one hand, is it really "right" or net positive for adults to guide children into some specialized craft at a young age? Even if the kid shows some prodigal predilection (haha) for it, maybe it is the responsibility of their guardians to expose them to a number of alternative interests/possibilities?
It's interesting because the approach of encouraging your kid to foster highly specific skills fails to satisfy the categorical imperative: if everybody did it, nothing would work. Or at least it seems that way... it's probably a safe bet that having a sizable majority of adolescents who are somewhat flexible/aimless and can respond to a variety of market demands in terms of career specialization is a good thing if not a necessary one.
On the other hand, manipulating (not to be taken with a necessary pejorative connotation) a child into this kind of specialization is almost certainly a necessary precondition for greatness. If you aren't a competent musician by the time you're 8 years old it is vanishingly unlikely you are ever going to be a true orchestral soloist. Ditto for something like chess. So if we want a world with those heights of greatness in it, we need to accept that some people are going to compel or allow their kids to be specialists rather than generalists.
> If you aren't a competent musician by the time you're 8 years old it is vanishingly unlikely you are ever going to be a true orchestral soloist. Ditto for something like chess
To me this sounds like an exception to the rule than rule itself. Our society would be perfectly fine to not have this type of entertainer "greatness". I mean, we got rid of castrados because it went too far but the line between cutting kids testicles off vs making them play some useless game 12 hours a day for a decade is quite blury.
I'd argue this extreme specialization of children is fundamentally unethical and should be shunned or even made illegal but it'll take decades if not centuries for our society to realize this because we just value this type "greatness" too highly.
Does this shape hold up good weight distribution properties when 3D-printed? Maybe this could be huge for 3D-printing mostly hollow, yet strong parts that require in fewer plastic and time spent.
So initially my thought was "why would this be better than existing infill patterns" but my second thought was that the reason Miura-ori patterns are interesting in the first place is because they fold. Not in this application so much, but in general, the way they flex is why they're interesting. The upshot here is that if you embedded that sort of pattern in a closed box, the degrees of freedom would try to transfer the force of a vertical load on the top to a horizontal stress in the outer shell of the base, in both x and y. A bit like a spherical dome.
I'm not sure that it's better than a dome; it might be for cases where you can't predict where on the top surface the load is going to be? I'm also not sure that a sheet of printed infill is sufficiently similar in its physical properties to a sheet of paper/card for this to transfer well, but it would be an interesting experiment to do.
There is also 3d printing origami shapes [1]. But 3D printing is still plastic(usually).
The idea of origami steel sheets has stuck on my mind ever since I found out about laser welding. Cutting thin 2mm sheets of steel, stitching them back together in different shapes, and holding tons of weight? That sounds very compelling to me.
Anyone knows how does 3D printed metals compare to CNC-made parts?
I know it's been used to build engines, which suggests they are strong, but there's also all this process around ancient swords around tempering, folding, etc that suggests that maybe just 3D-printing metals might result in weaker structures.
It’s amazing how emergent structural properties can come from simple, deterministic folding rules.
In algorithmic design, we often struggle to balance form and physical function. But rigid foldability proves that finding the exact right geometric constraint actually creates the function. Respect to the 14-year-old.
I'd be curious what kind of variation there was across his 54 different designs. If he's discovered the existence of a narrow window where strength dramatically increases, that seems a much more interesting find than if this whole family of origami patterns is knowns to perform well and this variant just happened to be slightly better than the rest. It's exciting to think that there may be super strong designs just waiting to be found with a little bit of rigorous refinement.
Submarines work on the principle of the arch: a spherical or cylindrical hull section transfers all the force into compression of the material so there is no net "inwards" force.
The weak points then turn out to be joints, material defects (the famous Titan failure), windows and other piercing points, and any unexpected shear forces.
This is weight distribution on a flat plain. Think of Roman Arches.
On a curved plain, weight distribution of THIS origami falls apart as pressure is added horizontally (not just vertically).
I've made similar tessellations before, they can be curved. You can trivially make a pre-folded tessellation into a cylinder of arbitrary diameter; to curve it like a submarine, you'd just adjust the angle of the creases. Optimize the curve so the pressure is always perpendicular and there's no problem here.
The real issue here is that there's not much point in it, as the very thing that makes this useful (the ability to fold it up) would also make it collapse easily in a pressurized environment. You'd also have to deal with preventing leaks if you wanted air inside, likely by adding an outer hull, which would then defeat the purpose.
> It's ok to say this has no practical uses but is very cool.
Agreed. But it doesn't go viral as much. Every cool robotics research goes with a comment that says "it could be useful for disaster response in a post-apocalyptic world where the conditions have changed in such a way that only my robot can save us".
Doesn't everyone else roll paper receipts etc. by the corner into a long stick? As a kid I sometimes licked the trailing corner to make it stick even better. I was and am always intrigued by how it becomes so much stronger and stiffer than the original flat sheet, but I never scienced too much into it :)
I wish the parents could be given a bit of credit. Instead we pretend the kid was doing this all solo... Its way less impressive when the parents are guiding them.
But the parents are doing lots of unappreciated work here.
I don't know, personally I think it's a bit weird for any mentor to expect recognition for their mentee's success. Surely the success itself is the reward? Pay it forward and all that. I would hope any parent would be adult enough not to feel like their child was stealing the spotlight from them.
You could look at this in at least two different ways. 1) journalism, and how it’s a better story if the kid is a self-contained genius; or 2) having youth be thankful for mentoring, and to understand little in life is achieved without others’ assistance.
I don’t consider that the parent comment is seeking to “steal the spotlight”; just that it’d be a more realistic appraisal of how success is achieved.
Agreed, but then it makes the whole thing a lot less impressive and it doesn't get viral.
Parents or a teacher most likely guided this kid to empirically measure how much weight a known origami fold can hold. I mean I remember that we were guided to do similar experiments at school when I was the same age... I don't remember making the news for "14-year olds empirically confirm Newton's law" :-).
It's individualist exceptionalism taken to modern extremes. I remember having these sorts of science assignment in middle school, one with dried pasta with textbooks, and another with dropping egg safely in a box. Invariably the winners won (me and my partner) because our dads had "advice" when we got home and they saw what we were playing with. Winning in my experience was the most corrosive part of those experiences because I literally did not come up with the solution.
I propose a moment of silence, for what if all the hype here proves to be half true, is the last time in history that there will be anything like a youth bieng able to achive a simple cognitive performance that distinguises them from a dollar store calculator.
It looks like the top 10% from 6th to 8th grade Society of Science fairs are invited to participate. They are then selected down to a top 300[1] and a top 30.[2] You can find a project name for the top 300 and a paragraph on each of the top 30.
These teen science fair winners almost never amount to anything exceptional, and are a product intense parental supervision. Most universities have wised up.
Sometimes, but I do find his story inspiring. He has taken an age old craft and demonstrated it may have practical applications. I hope he can patent some design based off this and then he can make some money off it. (Yes, I know he didn't invent this particular fold.)
> Yes, I know he didn't invent this particular fold
So how could he patent it?
I join the parent: it's a kid who empirically evaluated how much weight an existing fold can hold. It's not like he solved a hundred years old mathematical problem.
That evaluation has value and the possible use case of strong and cheap emergency housing is interesting though it sounds like it would take substantial work to push it to fruition and would need to be competitive with existing solutions.
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