Minecraft colosseum map

There are several competing theories for how the Ancient Romans originally calculated the curves of the Colosseum. The Colosseum is not a perfect ellipse, but rather an ovoid variant that closely resembles an ellipse.

While no one today knows with certainty how the Romans did it, I chose to use one of the leading theories by Ingegner Giuseppe Cozzo who hypothesizes that the Colosseum is a polycentric curve—i.e. a curve composed of multiple, connected circles with different radii.

Minecraft colosseum schematic

In this model, many differently-sized circles were centered at various points around the arena to create all the curves.

To model the curvature with Minecraft blocks, I first created equations to smoothly align circles of different sizes as they flowed from one curve to the next.

Then I configured a spreadsheet to mimic a Cartesian coordinate system and copied the circle equations into each cell which measured the cell’s distance from the particular circle’s origin. To map out the complete curve, I would then highlight clusters of cells whose distance from their respective origins was the closest to desi

colosseum in minecraft