Problem with stargate addresses

[Control_Chair]

Hi I am fairly new here so not sure if this has been discussed before but here it goes. I was browsing the internet and I found an interesting article concerning stargate addresses.

As Dr. Jackson explained in the stargate movie to connect to a planet using a stargate you need a 7 symbol address, the first six symbols act as co-ordinates, creating three intersecting lines, the destination. The stargate uses the seventh symbol as the point of origin allowing one to plot a straight line course to the destination, as shown in the diagram below.

300px-StargateCoordinates_svg.png

With 38 symbols there are (38×37×36×35×34×33) = 1,987,690,320 possible addresses
There are also 720 possible permutations to each address.

However using the above model some of those permutations should sill yield valid addresses. Take for example the address for Abydos:-

Taurus (A)
Serpens Caput (B)
Capricornus (C)
Monoceros (D)
Sagittarius (E)
Orion (F)

Let's assume first that the address ABCDEF is interpreted by forming 3 pairs of letters, for the sake of argument let's say it's the first two, the middle two, and the last two. So this address has line AB, line CD, and line EF which intersect to locate a destination. Then geometry says that we can reverse the endpoints of a line, AB = BA, etc. So each pair of endpoints can be written in 2 ways, and since we have 3 sets of endpoints, the means that we get 2^3 ways of dialing the same address just by reversing the endpoints. However, since all the matters is that each endpoint is associated with it's proper 'mate' (ie: A and B, etc), we can think of the address as having 3 pairs which then can be arranged in any order so long as the association between symbols remains the same; in other words: AB CD EF == AB EF CD. This increases the ways to dial a given address by a factor of 6. So for the actual computations:
• We start with all the permutations of the 38 non-point-of-origin symbols: 1,987,690,320
• Then we have to divide by 8 to correct for repeats from simply reversing the endpoints.
• Then we have to divide by 6 to correct for simply rearranging the lines within an address.
• This leaves us with 41,410,215 unique addresses to dial

.

Just to make absolutely clear I am in no way taking credit for what is said above, I am just making clear what was said on the other post and bringing it to people’s attention on this forum for discussion. The original article is available here
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Glyph

[thekillman]

this is already known. infact, earth's adress isnt even correct and the whole system is just...bogus

[K^2]

I've suggested an alternative system elsewhere, and you can take it for a spin if you follow the link in my sig. But yeah, the system they suggest in the show simply does not work.

[Quadhelix]

However using the above model some of those permutations should sill yield valid addresses. Take for example the address for Abydos:-

Taurus (A)
Serpens Caput (B)
Capricornus (C)
Monoceros (D)
Sagittarius (E)
Orion (F)

On idea that I have heard is that each "chevron" represents a different part of the "box," so changing the order completely screws up the box, rendering a nonsense address. Thus, the idea is that Abydos's address is the only one using all six of those symbols that has an physical meaning; any other arrangement yields a box with an imaginary volume, or something equally meaningless.

There is a certain appeal to this idea: if you take three "random" lines, it is very unlikely that any of them will intersect any other of them, let alone all intersect at the same point. If, however, you define a box, and then take the address to be the center of the box, that is a fair bit more workable.

Of course, under this system, FABCDE might be the same address as ABCDEF unless there was some reason why A had to come first, but even so, that would still mean that there were only 2,760,681 unique 'Gate addresses (since FABCDE would go to the same place as ABCDEF if it goes anywhere, I'm counting them as the same address). This means that for each Stargate address in the Milky Way, there are somewhere between 70,000 and 140,000 stars.




A possibility that I thought up in response to this thread is roughly as follows (be warned that I haven't really fleshed it out):

Each pair of symbols defines a great circle around the center of the galaxy, or something similar (or perhaps something closer to a "great ellipse," or something along those lines). These two sets of ellipses would "nearly" intersect in two places: near the Earth and somewhere on the opposite end of the galaxy. However, the "great ellipse" would not be complete in the actual address: it would start at one symbol and end at the other; the order of symbols would determine whether it took the "short path" to get from one symbol to the other or the "long path" all the way around the galaxy.

As the system stands, each set of symbols would have only two valid addresses (one near Earth and one opposite the galactic core) and each of those addresses could be represented by six permutations of the symbols (i.e., ABCDEF=CDEFAB=EFABCD=ABEFCD=CDABEF=EFCDAB, and BADCFE=DCFEBA=FEBADC=BAFEDC=DCBAFE=FEDCBA).

The system would obviously have to be tweaked so that A) the addresses could lead to anywhere in the Milky Way, rather than just near Earth and opposite the galactic core and B) each permutation represents a different address.