[jitl]

I read a novel when I was 14 or so who's premise is all about creatures inhabiting higher-dimensional space called "The Boy Who Reversed Himself" by William Sleator. I loved Sleator's books, they introduced me to really interesting concepts from theoretical physics as a youngun. If you find 4D Doom intriguing, I encourage you to borrow the book from your favorite ebook library, it's a quick fun read (at least, I remember it that way).

[Darmani]

Fun fact: William Sleator's brother is the famous computer scientist Danny Sleator, inventor of the splay tree.

[UltraSane]

Part of Greg Egan novel Diaspora takes place in a universe with 5 spatial dimensions.

[chronolitus]

Loved this book! Part of this project started from wanting to make 4D creatures and train them to walk with RL. One interesting fact I learned is that ants would probably have 8 legs in 4D.

Why? Well, apparently ants have 6 legs because this allows tripod-gait, a simple leg movement that always keeps 3 stable points on the ground[1]

In 4D, you'd need 4 points on the ground, hence tetra-pod gait (4+4 legs).

You could of course do with less, I'd guess even as low as 1-2 if you have lots of muscles and good balance.

[1] https://dugas.ch/4d_creatures/tripod_gait.html

[ConceptJunkie]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the statement in the book (IIRC) that it takes 8 legs to be stable in 5 dimensions. I'd assumed it would be 6, but this is a layman's intuition. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

Awesome book regardless.