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Physics of Billiards
Chris May writes "Amateur Physics for the Amateur Pool Player seems to have been around a while, but I have never seen it mentioned here. I know it would appeal to much of the Slashdot community-- 109 pages of complex Newtonian mechanics, on a trivial but informative subject. Hard to believe someone went to all this trouble." I'm having painful flashbacks - must - suppress - memories.
I wonder if we'll eventually see a computer/robot vs. Human pool match a la Gary Kasparaov & Deep Blue? A pool playing robot would be simple enough (in comparison to something like Deep Blue) that any big engineering college should be able to put one together. Put it up against a world champion pool players, and you've definately got something for pay-per-view.
....these physics actually apply during tournaments. I think that during actual competition, everything reverses itself, all laws of physics go wacky, and a magic invisible goblin sits in each pocket and diverts all balls away from the pockets.
I assumed by the spelling in their posts that they never took those classes...
Sorry, I know it's mean, but I couldn't help myself.
--
function location() {
if (my.state != "coding" & my.conscious == true)
{
return ("at the pool hall");
}
}
and while at the pool hall (Amsterdam Billiard Club, NYC) I have watched and played many professional pool players.
Yes, pool is governed by the laws of physics (even when your opponent snaps the nine-ball in three consecutive times).
No, knowledge of these physical laws will not make you a professional player.
Take a bank shot, for example. If you assume that the angle of deflection of the object ball into the rail equals the angle of deflection, calculate that angle and shoot, there's still a good chance you won't make the shot. One reason: from table to table the hardness of the rails varies.
A few other variables which your ruler and protractor probably won't account for:
crap in the air (humidity affects the speed of the cloth)
crap stuck to the balls
crap on the table (damn that shard of chalk!)
crap on your cue tip (chalk/no chalk?)
crap going on around you (people talking about the likelihood of you missing)
crap on the line (the money you're about to give the guy who's kicking the crap out of you.)
So, when you get right down to it:
pool == physics + Random (crap);
and the good players have a better sense of smell.
"ooh, I got you all wet..." "yes, but my martini's still dry."
The first robot ever to play snooker (related to the game of pool) was developed under a team led by Professor Khorosh Khodabandehloo at the University of Bristol, UK.
The Bristol snooker robot played a famous match against the then world snooker champion, Steve Davis of the UK. The robot, a customised IBM Model 7565, was severely handicapped because its operating envelope covered only about 87% of the table and also because freeplay in its joints limited its mechanical accuracy and repeatability. The strategy part of the robot was quite sophisticated having been based on advice from Steve Davis himself. It was able to make forward and reverse analyses of states of play based on support logic programming (related to but more powerful than fuzzy logic programming). The cue it used to hit a ball was actually a pneumatic piston powered by compressed air. Davis beat the robot easily! As an undergrad student, I helped to design, implement and test the robot's image processing software using the now defunct Automatix AV4 Image Processing System once made by Robotic Vision Systems, Inc..
The whole project was filmed and shown on BBC television on the Q.E.D. science programme of 16th March 1988. Extraordinarily there are now no webpages at Bristol University to celebrate this pioneering robotics project. Professor Khorosh Khodabandehloo has left Bristol University to run his own robotics consultancy. One of his former research assistants, Ken Ho, however, has made webpages about the Bristol snooker robot: here and here.
Scroogle