Dominos are small rectangular blocks, usually marked with pips resembling those on dice, that can be lined up side by side. A domino is ineffective by itself, but once it begins to fall, it sets off a chain reaction that can grow exponentially. This concept of a domino effect is often used in writing, especially in novels. It can also be applied to any event that affects a larger group of people, such as a political movement or an economic shift.
Lily Hevesh first started playing with dominoes when she was 9 years old, with the classic 28-piece set her grandparents had in their house. She loved arranging them in straight or curved lines and then flicking the first one to watch the rest of them tumble down. Now 20, she’s a professional domino artist, creating intricate setups for movies, TV shows, events—even a Katy Perry album release. Hevesh says that while there are a lot of different factors that contribute to a great domino project, one physical phenomenon is essential: gravity. This force pulls a fallen domino toward the Earth and crashes it into the next piece, causing them all to fall in an even, rhythmic cascade.
Hevesh’s work is impressive, but the biggest challenge when designing a domino project is not predicting how the pieces will fall—it’s actually getting them to fall. The process can take hours, days, or even weeks to complete, and even the slightest mistake can derail the whole thing. She’s worked on projects that have required 300,000 dominoes and helped set a Guinness World Record for the most dominoes in a circular arrangement. And while she has a knack for planning out her designs, it takes several nail-biting minutes for them to reach their final state.
The term domino, in fact, was coined in 1957 by journalist Robert Alsop for his political column on the Cold War. He cited the example of America’s support for South Vietnam, and how this could lead to Communism spreading throughout the region, to illustrate a scenario in which “one domino may be permitted to knock over another domino until it reaches the end of the line.” Today, the phrase is more commonly used to describe any situation where one small trigger can cause a series of events that spreads like a wave or ripples outward.
Domino can be used to play a variety of games, most commonly blocking and scoring. A typical domino set includes a double-six set of tiles, with each tile having two open ends (opposite each other). A player wins the game by being the first to place a tile with matching pips on both its right and left sides, for instance a 4-6 or a 5-5. Larger sets have progressively greater numbers of pips—the most common being a double-nine set, with 55 tiles.
The Domino platform lets teams share and run their models on a single server, with the model’s code and data stored in a database that tracks each run. This centralization enables easy scaling, allows users to enforce access controls for collaborators and to merge changes automatically, and makes it simple to serve results or diagnostics via a web form to internal consumers.