A LEGO Brickumentary Page #4
to take the car down.
The big joke at LEGO
conventions is the 1x5.
And uh, for those of you that
don't know what a 1x5 is...
That is a guy code in the LEGO community
for a hot girl.
And, it's because LEGO
doesn't make a 1x5.
Years ago, hot girls at conventions
were a rarity.
But, you know, luckily I have my 1x5,
so I'm all good.
My definition of adults that play
with LEGOs are just tall kids.
I like to build,
but I'm not the best builder.
Do you wanna know
who the best builder is?
My mom.
I'm finishing up just the last few
of the birch trees
here behind the library.
And, uh,
it's in the middle of Rivendell.
And we're really excited
about finishing it,
but we're also a little bit surprised
at how big it turned out to be.
You never quite know when you're
working on one section at a time,
until you put it all together.
I just started building again
when my son was getting
interested in building.
Let's make it only two segments long.
Why?
Because we don't want it to be too wide,
'cause it's up next to rocks.
I went from doing laundry one day
to having over two and a half
million hits on my Flickr pages.
And it was pretty overwhelming.
For two years in a row
Alice's work has received
the coveted People's Choice Award
from convention goers.
This year she's built
an enormous model of Rivendell,
the mythic city from
The Lord of the Rings.
I think people are going to like it.
I don't think that there's
anything quite like it.
One of my favorite things
to do in a convention is
to encourage the girls to build.
LEGO has historically
really been focused on boys.
And they have admitted they have only
been addressing half the population.
They're now taking it seriously.
I think there's a tremendous world
of possibilities
that has been untapped so far.
There are lots of girls
who come up and say,
"Thank you for being a role model."
Raise the drawbridge!
Load the "cattle-pults"!
Release the hounds!
Oh! Hi, guys.
As you can see, people build
all sorts of things out of LEGO bricks.
The combinations people come up with,
it's almost infinite.
Wait a minute,
I wonder if it is infinite. Hey!
There's a guy in Denmark
trying to figure that out.
I'm going to talk about
things that we know about
the growth of the number
of LEGO configurations.
My name is Soren Eilers.
I'm a professor of mathematics.
It all started in LEGOLAND, actually.
It was one of those rainy days
in Danish summer,
and I was there with my daughter.
Soren saw a display dedicated
to the original patent
filed by Ole's son, Godtfred.
Godtfred was asked
by the patent officer,
"ow many ways can you put
together six of these bricks?"
And he says, something like,
"We're still working on it,
but when I left home,
we had 102,981,000,"
or something like that.
And so I was wondering
how they computed that number
because it seemed to be
a difficult mathematical problem.
What LEGO had done
was to just count the... the towers
where you put the things
on top of each other.
Whereas if I have a building
that is sort of low and wide,
I have a lot of options
for the final one.
this with theory,
but I didn't get anywhere.
So, essentially, all that I could think
of doing was ask a computer.
In fact my program was very inefficient.
Took me a week to compute this number.
The correct number
is quite a lot higher.
The correct number is 915,103,765.
But once Soren had the number,
what happens if you add a seventh brick?
Or an eighth?
So it's pretty easy to count
all the way to five.
Six, I can now recompute this number
maybe in five minutes or so.
And then each time it takes
about a hundred times more.
So, next time it's a couple of hours.
Counting eight it took me
something like 500 hours.
So if I was to count with nine or ten...
This would probably take years,
maybe hundreds of years.
So what does this unsolvable problem
By mathematical definition,
this is a finite system.
We have a finite number of bricks.
They have a finite number
of studs and holes.
But for all practical human purposes,
these bricks are infinitely flexible,
and not only that, they define
a mathematical problem
of infinite complexity.
So I would say that,
"Yes, it is finite,
but in a way it's also infinite."
I think this is the beginning
of what we call systematic creativity.
This basic system of tubes and studs
that locks together,
and it will take a child's idea
or an adult's idea,
and it'll hold it together.
It'll give it form and give them
a new medium of communication.
The interesting thing with
the LEGO brick, as we see here,
is that the instructions
for how it fits with the rest
is actually embedded.
We don't need an instruction.
We don't need a dictionary or grammar.
It's embedded in the system.
It became this platform
where people all over the world
had a shared language,
it's like the letters or notes in music.
It's a creative tool,
it's a creative medium,
but it's also a language.
It's a language that's more global
than English and Windows.
So with such a limitless product,
how did the LEGO company experience
anything but constant success?
Believe it or not, not that long ago,
the company was in pretty dire straits.
On the CBS Worldwide Market Watch,
the Danish toymaker LEGO
today reported
If the kids love it, why then is
the Danish company in so much trouble?
had an unprecedented growth rate
when it really got
the bricks right in '78,
until the mid-1990s.
It was growing fast, everything was good,
and it suddenly collapsed.
Sales of two of their
three big products fall off a cliff.
And they almost went out of
business in 2003.
Ten years ago, our company
was in serious trouble,
and the wonderful thing about it,
we couldn't blame anybody else.
They had lost sight
of their most important asset:
the genius of the LEGO system.
Smart people from around the world
had told LEGO in the '90s
that this brick is gonna
become irrelevant.
You need to find new things.
It was seen as...
Actually, this was seen as uncool.
They were making more and more
custom pieces for specific sets.
At one point, they had
over 14,000 unique elements.
Some of the sets had only a few elements
and required almost no construction.
When we made products
which were quicker to build,
those who didn't like to build
still said, "I don't like to build it.
I'd rather buy a die-cast car
or doll or something else."
like LEGO for what it is,
they said, "What is this now?"
And because we didn't understand that
and also because
we were actually, frankly,
quite arrogant as a company
towards our customers,
we were making the wrong products,
and we were not even
able to deliver the products
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"A LEGO Brickumentary" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 22 Dec. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/a_lego_brickumentary_1945>.
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