'. . . fractional deviations in these constants are not arbitrary, but correspond precisely to
the geometric cross-sections of “Sturmian worms” (topological defects) required to enforce
aperiodicity.'
I find it hard to take seriously for this reason: the proton is not an elementary particle but rather a composite particle whose mass is the sum of the masses of quarks in it and also the binding energy of the gluons and the electrostatic binding energy. The mainstream way to calculate it is a very complex computational Lattice QCD problem:
The ratio of the electron mass to, I dunno, the top quark mass might be a fundamental quality that can be calculated in a few lines, but I've been seeing outsiders write simple formulas for mₚ/mₑ for most of my life and haven't been impressed.
I think it's a little preposterous to conjecture that the inverse of the fine structure constant is "governed" by the expression N^2+C^2 + ((1+sqrt(5))/2)^(N-C) with N=11 and C=4. You can probably find hundreds more approximations by other arbitrary formula of similar complexity, all lacking in explanatory power of why the formula should look like that.
is the number accurate or not? and minimal aperiodic tilings of the infinite plane are not uninteresting, they are related to turing completeness. whatever. how accurate is it? you tell me.
Yeah, I always get depressed[1] when us Hacker News[2] Readers fail to mention little tidbits[3] of facts that connect things together like Erdos Number[4]. It's indeed solely for these little random facts that I come here at all. My knowledge of them, and my need to cite[5] them whenever they are even marginally related to the article I at most skimmed allow me to feel like I'm part of a special group indeed.
If someone does not mention these facts that I myself know, and many readers of this site know, then I feel completely at a loss. What am I to do? Am I to critically think of the article at hand. See the man depicted as something other then the distillation of these tidbits of Wikipedia article links scattered in my memory? Or do I think: no, this is an existential issue. Anyone who does not know, does not mention, does not prostrate themselves before an uhh... numbering system... are the lost ones. Not I!
This same pedantic drive, which drives the entirety of my life, also compels me to correct you: it's actually called an Erdős number.
Awesome concept and game idea Matt. Would be interesting to maybe add a simple 'stroke count' idea and add to scoring. I know -0zero- about painting but it might drive players to be closer to how IRL painters paint.
Anyone know many strokes it takes an average artist to get to completion? [sorry joke had to be made but really curious about answer as well].
This already gave me a better feel about what painters do, and I'm blind in the mind.
Comments about trolling the scoring algorithm seemed a little silly to me, if you folks want max score just run some sort of soft-ICE, scan the sandboxed mem and change it ;) This is a really cool idea and I love it.
Did no one notice the balls? Those are there so a set of external cameras [think motion capture] can feed in an absolute, essentially perfect state estimate to the control algorithm. It's probably a run of the mill system from Vicon [company].
Essentially if you're running vicon you can make flying things do things like you could make them do programming them in Blender or similar, subject to the [pretty minimal to the human eye] time constants of the mechanical systems. Brushless speed controllers are pretty fast, servos are as well [but way slower]. The end-to-end control loops we are talking about are in the ballpark of 1khz easy and have been for quite some years.
If they had balls they'd take off the balls ;) Other than that it is essentially CGI in real life ;)
Sorry don't mean to be negative it looks cool guys. Now go make it actually cool.
I ain't got no darn PhD in control theory from some fancy skool er nuthin but my gut tells me for this situation it's the state estimation that actually composes the beavers tail under the wattuh of dis dat der prollem.
> Essentially if you're running vicon you can make flying things do things like you could make them do programming them in Blender or similar
It is not quite that easy though. Yes having an external tracker will give you a reliable, high quality source of position and orientation.
But that does not mean that you can “program them in Blender”. You still need to figure out what kind of trajectories your system can or can’t follow and how to map from position and orientation errors to actuation outputs.
If you can’t control the robot with external tracking then you have no hope of controlling it with internal state estimation, so if you already have the test facilities it makes sense to start with that. That way you are not debuging two crappy subsystems depending on each other and failing spectacularly.
On a quick glance, they do not mention if they are using the external cameras for the control algorithm or just verifying the results. The QR code-like markers on the gates suggests that there is also some onboard cameras.
The statistics on the measurement errors suggests that they have a ground truth (from external cameras?) which they compare to some other source of measurement.
So I would not draw the conclusion that the tracker balls and external cameras are doing all the heavy lifting here.
> The QR code-like markers on the gates suggests that there is also some onboard cameras.
I would be carefull with conclusions like that. These facilities are usually shared between a lot of different experiments through the years. The presence of QR codes on the gates certainly implies that someone at least once thought they might want to use onboard cameras in some experiment.
Are they used in this project? You can’t really tell by just looking at the presence of the QR code.
Same as I can’t tell if you are hungry or not by observing the presence of an oven in your kitchen.
I'm pretty sure that the "facility" is a gymnasium with cloth on the walls and floor to protect them. And, the hanging gates are rigid pink insulating foam sheets, probably made and hung custom for this project.
And this is the point I am making. There are many student studying aeroastro at MIT. Not all of their projects are about small drones but many are. And if the small drone test they want to do fits into this room they seem to prefer it. And if one project makes some gizmo (like those gates) for themselves and it looks usefull they won’t throw it away, but chuck it somewhere for storage and then the future projects, such as this one we are just discussing, reuses them.
shouldn't they be training the models to detect the poachers and not the animals to be poached?
I get that it is cool to be able to ooohcrazy train a model to select between different species but like all tools this is one that can be used by both sides-- and assuredly will be.
Training a model to identify poachers is A: way easier B: waaay more actionable C: way less sexy for a news report and fun for nature lovers, and NVIDIA's shareholders, unfortunately.
Unfortunately for the pangolins C will probably always trump. . .
> Training a model to identify poachers is A: way easier
Maybe, maybe not. What if the poachers do super difficult things like a) wear a cardboard box, or b) attach some twigs to themselves, or c) walk like a tree?
lol I thought we were discussing programming paradigms-- but at the same time I think considering the NVIC and different peripheral/vs high speed busses may be relevant.
