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Pentium Throws a Fastball
phillippaxton writes: "Abner Doubleday lives in the 21st century. Two mechanical engineers have gotten together and created what may be the perfect pitching machine, powered by a P3 850MHz computer. Using an eight-axis industrial robot, it has the ability to throw practically any pitch within the strike zone. Custom-built software enables you to choose the type of pitch by pointing at a touch-screen, setting the speed, location, handedness, as well as fastball, curveball, slider, slurve, changeup, cutter, sinker, splitfinger fastball or knuckleball. There's also a database of 2500 preset pitches in a database."
Nope, that's a sinker. Curveball has lateral spin away from the pitching arm (slider is towards the pitching arm).
I'd still like to see how a machine gets a knuckleball in the strike zone every time ;)
"Pitching" is a baseball term. Unless you say "pitching a tent." Then it means you have a "woody." Unless, of course, you are talking about "camping." Then it means something else, entirely.
At a Microsoft PDC last year or the year before they demonstrated a file system implemented inside a SQL Server table. The BLOB contained a filesystem. Inside this filesystem, they created a SQL Server instance. Viola: A database in a database.
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"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
throw obscure_reference
I hope they name the prototype Spencer Talos.
First of all there is cost. Every carpenter I know owns a handsaw. For small cuts I will take a handsaw over a power saw anyday for speed, and thats even when the power saw is already pluged in! I've seen it over and over again: the handsaw is faster then the power saw. Of course there are two things to note: the hand saw user cannot do a second cut at near the speed, so the power saw wins in endurance. Also, not all cuts qualify, I'm thinking of very selected cuts where the fastest tool is a handsaw. (this applies to both metal and wood working)
There are still farmers today who farm entiely without tractors in an area where tractors are avaiable. They love their horses (oxen, donkeys, ...) enough that the slow speed is worth it. I'm not talking about Amish or others who do it for religion reasons, there are normal people who's hobby is farming with animals.
Baseball does not allow (or at least didn't) instant replys in the game. What the umpire sees is what is, even if the ump really is blind. Football allows them. Compare and you will soon notice that replays are a major factor in almost every play in football. I prefer baseball's approach even though it means teams have lost because of the umps error. Part of the game is the human error. I'm not claiming either way is better mind you, make your own decision.
Fah! We might as well use a cannon instead of a pitcher as well. In fact, I am sure that with a little engineering we could get a supersonic fastball. We might need to replace the catcher, but that shouldn't be hard as you wouldn't need to worry about errant pitches. We should also consider arming the first basemen with battle-axes. That way if a hitter does manage to connect with the ball the first baseman can make sure that the poor fool doesn't make it to first base. Heck, why not just give all the players automatic weapons and see which team has the most players standing at the end of nine innings.
This is precisely the reason why there are rules to baseball. Everyone knows that you could have better pitchers just by letting them spit on the ball. But the point is the competition. Someone somewhere along the way decided that spitting on the balls was illegal (for whatever reason), and so now hitters don't have to worry about "spitballs." The rules may be strange (and sometimes fairly arbitrary), but folks like to watch and play baseball, and the rules allow the game to proceed fairly. Mixing in a robot pitcher may be great for hitting practice, but it would almost certainly be against the rules for competition, and since it wouldn't really be that fun to watch it almost certainly won't ever become legal.
ahahaha don't you know anything about baseball? The pitcher has to be able to _field_ the ball -not just throw the ball to the batter.
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Agreed. I'd like to hope that baseball isn't the sort of game where somebody sat down one day and came up with it. Didn't we all invent Calvinball-type games? The best ones involved hitting balls with sticks and running around, IMHO. Baseball seems like a natural occurrence.
-Waldo
Nope, not Cartwright, either. (Unless he came up with the rules as an infant. :) See this weekend's story on this topic, "Early Reference to Baseball Found."
-Waldo
We will not have the perfect pitching robot until it also scratchs itself for a minute and a half in between pitches.
Come on. It's got to do much more than that to be the perfect pitching robot. It has to be able to show up at spring training 200 pounds overweight yet still bitch about "only" making $6 million a year. It has to be a named defendant in at least one paternity suit. It has to be able to snort cocaine for years, come close to blowing its entire career, and then suddenly find Jesus.
This thing's still got a long way to go.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I think you actually meant to say:
Cheers...
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
>How do do hit the ball and not smash the machine
>throwing it?
I'd assume it's somewhat like a regular batting machine and sits behind a shield of some kind.
Not exactly rocket science...
-l
See, robots could never replace real ballplayers, because mankind doesn't have the technology to build a robot as ugly as Randy Johnson :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
That'd be a great challenge -- who could outdo who and still stay within the "rules" of baseball, and maybe the limits of human ability/perception.
It'd be interesting to know if a really good pitcher is always better than a really good batter, or vice-versa.
Whatever the market will bear.
Baseball is BIG business. The value of a product is determined by the perceived value to the one who has the funds.
My guess is that they will sell quite a few of these. Good for them. I hope that they are very successful.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I'm all for the purity of baseball; the homerun derby is simply eye-candy for all the rainy day fans. But anyone who watched the derby monday night who knew anything about baseball would have noticed that the pitching coaches made a huge difference in how it turned out. Sammy Sosa went with a pitching coach of his choice in the first round and barely moved on with only 3 homers. In the second round he chose to use someone else's coach and smacked 8 dingers. Obviously, the difference in pitching helped him out. With a machine like this, we could guarantee all the batters would be fairly pitched to.
"I don't sink this word means what he sinks it means." -- Inigo
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
If by this you men the episode where Catherine convinces Bill to use a bunch of ridiculously fake "street-talk" in his racially offensive malt-liquor commercials, then no. This is not that episode, although this episode does reference that episode. Catherine tells Bill: "Wazzup, y'all" is seriously dated and that today's cool street people greet one another "Gazziza!" In the "Space" episode, Bill and Catherine greet one another: "Gazziza, Bill." "Gazizza, Catherine." Also very funny...
Anyone know all the words to Bill's "misinformed" Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor ad? I remember it was hilarious. It had a line like "It has the zazzapy gazmossis that will keep your feet stinkin' all night long" or something like that. The mix of badly phony "hip" words with absurd variants of real "street" reinterpretations (think "keep your feet stinkin'" as being like "down with that," or "you bad") was just plain hilarious...
I immediately thought of the Newsradio "Space" episode. Joe is thawed out in the far future and immediately asks who won the World Series since he went into hibernation. I forget the exact words, but it was something like "In 2021 it was the Yankees, 2022 the Braves, 2023 the Robots, '24 the Robots, Robots, Robots...."
Made me laugh...
The abstract here intimated that it was a robot arm or something. I was all excited to see a robot arm and hand controlled to simulate a real pitcher's arm. What do I get? Same ol' auto-pitcher technology with a little extra control grafted on. Cool, yes, but seems a little like bait-and-switch to me. What do they pay the editors here for?!
Blar.
They still haven't made a computer that can hit the ball... this requires significantly more smarts to do in the general case.
Now all we need is a robotic batter. We could network the two together and eliminate humans all together.
It has to be able to show up at spring training 200 pounds overweight ...
Geeesh. And it already weighs 2,700 pounds.
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the pun is mightier than the sword
So? People pay $7 million for pitchers who can't pitch anywhere near that consistently. Just look at the Mets. :)
For more information, click here.
Padding in football? Oh, you mean that "sport" americans call football. Real football players (Aussie rules, Rugby League | Union) dont wear padding or helmets.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
It's intimidating the batter, being intimidated by the batter. It's watching a pitcher go 7 innings, after throwing 100+ pitches, tiring out but still throwing 95mph fastballs. It's Clemens throwing chunks of bat at Piazza. It's waiting for some batter to go after Pedro Martinez, bat in hand (God, I hate Pedro!)
You can't compare baseball to plowing a field, or making crayons. Baseball is sports entertainment, not work. And Battlebots/Robot Wars/Robotica don't count. Those are not robots, they're glorified remote control cars.
Now, the idea of human sized and shaped, fully automatic, non R/C robots fighting ala WWF, that might get my interest. But mostly for watching how the bots are built.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Oh come, come! If Rummy and Dick can get the Pentagon to produce a missile defence, how hard would it be to adapt the system to hitting fastballs? Who knows, this might even make missile defence against an imaginary adversary worthwhile! :-P
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
It's a metadatabase.
If you post it, they will read.
i'd hate to see it's fork ball...
are here. note the $175,000 pricetag and the $18,000 maintenance fee. must be former IBM engineers. :)
I've batted against this thing at the Vet in Philly where they have one set up, and I must say that is extremely realistic in that if you can see the pitches hand and you can watch for the seams instead of the old goofy BP balls. The only complaint is every pitcher and ever pitch has the same release. Like the article says there is no 3/4 release and there are no sidearm or submariners, but on the whole it's an amazing device and mixes up the pitches well. If you're near a ballpark in your hometown, I recommend trying it.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
I have to disagree with the sediment. I think they mix quite well.
That's not a very concrete response.
OMG! What are you smoking? King of The Hill is the worst piece of animated trash I've ever seen! It makes Beavis and Butthead look intelectual!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
hmmm, where is the the moderation option when I need it...
padding? in baseball?
NEWS FLASH! Pentium Pitching Machine denied nomination to Hall of Fame after emery board found in power supply!
The Pitching Machine denied comment, but said it planned to retire to a life of embittered interviews with Bob Costas and lousy commercial promotions.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
It might help us off-worlders if you actually made at least one reference to the subject to which the term "pitching" is applicable.
Is it that lame game that's like Rounders?
xx Stuii!
Bender: Clem Johnson? That sack of skin wouldn't have lasted one pitch in the old Robot Leagues. Now, Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern-hitting machine.
Leela: Exactly. He was a machine designed to hit blerns. I mean, come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels.
Bender: Oh, and I suppose Pitch-O-Mat 5000 was just a modified Howitzer?
Leela: Yep.
Bender: You know, you humans are so scared of a little robot competition you won't even let us on the field.
If all this thing can throw is strikes, any half-decent batter should be able to smack the crap out of it. The reason good pitchers are good is because they get the batter to swing at stuff they just can't hit.
The way this season is going, they'll probably get this robot into the Mets' bullpen. :(
Unix: Where
Ok, I admit, this is kind of cool. If I was a baseball player, I might even buy one to practice with. But what it really boils down to is this; baseball is boring enough as is, does anyone REALLY want to sit around watching a robot throw out pitches?
When they make one that can do leg-spin and offspin and throw a Googly they'll have something to show off about.
They don't build muscle mass and power, the hours that McGwire puts into strength training do that. The supplements are no good if you are just sitting on the couch. By the way, not many of McGwires HRs would have been in play even if you took 10 feet off them.
I heard about this machine right after spring training. The article specifically mentions the Cleveland Indians as having used the machine. Marty Cordova, an outfielder for the Indians, was a significant user of the machine before and after practice, and he attributes the machine to helping him get back into his prior form. With the help of the extra batting practive from this machine he was able to raise his batting average by 93 points so far over last year.
What I don't understand is why every major league team doesn't have one of these machines. Why will they pay a player $20 Million per season, but won't invest in a $200 K machine that will help make EVERY one of their players better?
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
Are they going to make available an accessory to inject some spit onto the ball?
Perhaps they could experiment to find the best adulterant to create really wild pitches!
But seriously, what about the spitball?
Cincinnati, OH- Two Reds pitchers were placed on this disabled list today. Johnny Johnson was placed on the 60-day DL with a blow tendon in his pitching elbow. Johnson is scheduled to undergo Tommy John surgery tomorrow. Linus Blazer, the phenom pitching robot, was placed on the 15-day DL to upgrade its repetoire. Blazer is scheduled to undergo a ./configure; make; make install Thursday.
The thing is, it's not up to a computer to determine where the strike zone is. It's up to the umpire. Different umps call the zone more tightly or more loosely than other umps. What's going to happen when this thing throws a fastball to the outside corner and the ump calls it a ball? Who wins, computer or umpire?
In fact, aluminum bats are used all the way from t-ball to triple-A.
I can't find any documentation to confirm or refute your claim, but I don't believe aluminum bats are used in MLB-affiliated minor leagues.
High school, college and probably some independent pro/semi-pro leagues allow aluminum, but I'm pretty sure you won't find metal bats in the minors. And I know only wooden bats were allowed at the Sydney Olympics.
But I could be wrong. Somebody back one of us up!
I always thought the sport would be a lot more interesting if everyone had a bat, and was allowed to use it as they see fit.\ =\=\=\
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All we need now is a robotic batter. Baseball has never been so much fun!
More
(a) pick the processor that supports OSes and tools you are familiar with and can easily get and that will let you do all your initial software development on your existing computers, or
(b) try to save $200 per unit by going with a cheaper processor that requires tools you aren't familiar with, and new development systems?
If I'm not mistaken, I remember reading in American History class about Native Americans playing a form of baseball when European settlers began coming to the "New World". Playing with a stick as a bat and a ball made from some sort of filled leather "ball".
That's lacrosse.
Totally different sport.
I'm sure for the actually pitching part of the machine an 850 Mhz machine isn't needed. But for the graphics and to reproduce the finger position of the pitcher you need a little bit more horsepower!
God, I hate baseball.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
It's not whether a pitcher is/isn't the best, but when.
There's baseball as hitting and pitching, then there's baseball the game. Machines might make better pitchers or hitters, but they won't improve the game just by doing what they do better than any human could.
Or better yet a DSP. I'd like to see a GHz Pentium 3 that can smoke a DSP a quarter the clock speed. Obviously they're best at what they do, but it sounds like this is exactly what DSPs do best.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
We all do understand that the functionality of the robot has nothing to do with the fact that it's running on a Pentium, right? It's about software, not hardware.
max
Their G4-powered iPitcher is oriented at minor league players and throws perfect goofballs, which come out in graphite, flower power, and blue dalmatian variety.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Finally I now have a reason to watch baseball. Look out for the blue screen of death changeup.
There's also a database of 2500 preset pitches in a database.
I've been trying to figure out for years how to include a database as a field in another database. How'd they do it?
Hahahaha!!! I went to this site, and read one of the articles, and part of another. I was thinking "Holy crap, how could anyone be so stupid". Then I realized, the entire site is one big troll. Very funny! I bet they get a lot of misdirected hatemail... :-)
I modded the Troll Investigation and I got
Padding is a weapon. It hurts a whole lot more to get smashed in your padded chest with a helmet, worn by someone on the other team who can run at full throttle without fear because they are "protected", than to simply be hit in the unprotected chest by another person's head. There are way more injuries in football (NFL, CFL, NCAA) than in Rugby or Australian Rules. How often do rugby players become parapa/quadripalegics?
In hockey, lacrosse, and *especially* hurling, you have a stick in your hand to inflict lots of damage with. Hurling is a real "manly" sport, but Rugby or Aussie rules are no meaner than NFL football. The players in the NFL are much bigger and stronger too - you don't see many 350+ pounders in Rugby...
Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. They needed to ascribe the game to someone, but didn't know who the real inventor was so they basically picked Doubleday because he was a good guy. He had NOTHING to do with the invention of the game!
This "Mr. Baseball" page will open your eyes if you've been under the long-held mistaken notion that Doubleday invented the great American pastime. The real inventor's name was Cartwright.
Or was it Costanza?
Playing devil's advocate, there are many who theorize that the money spent on NASA/DOD programs that have commercial spin-offs would have gone further in the commercial sector in the first place due to NASA/DOD overhead and things like, oh, bombs, bullets, etc.
OTOH, the fear of losing a war can be a great motivator to the ingenuity of the DOD crowd (or the loss of human life or desire to reach the moon first IRT NASA) that the commercial sector might be missing.
"Population 1,656"
The question is - why keep pitchers at all? When society realized that it was better to plow with a tractor than a bunch of oxen, we got rid of the oxen. When we realized that it was better to manufacture and box crayons with robotics than with third-world child labor, we did that, too.
The purpose of plowing with oxen was to hget the plowing done, not to exercise the oxen. The purpose of manufacturing and boxing crayons is to have boxes of crayons to sell. The purpose of Paul Bunyan's lumberjacking was to get trees cut down so they could be used as wood. Etcetera.
The purpose of baseball isn't to get pitches thrown, or to get home runs hit. The world has no independent need for well-thrown pitches or home runs, outside the context of baseball. (When we do need similar activities performed outside of baseball, we already do use machines -- see, for example, the grenade launcher.)
The purpose of baseball, if it has one, is to experience and observe competition among teams of human beings. Therefore, replacing the human beings with robots necessarily undermines the point of the activity.
I'd be delighted to see a seprate league for robot-vs-robot baseball games, but it doesn't make sense to replace human athletes because the machines perform the tasks "better." By that standard, the dawn of auto racing should have meant the end of track & field sports. After all, cars are "better" than runners at getting from Point A to Point B quickly, aren't they?
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WWW.TETSUJIN.ORG
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The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
Yanks: best team that money can buy... and killing off baseball in MOST of the rest of this country (and oh yes, Canada too) pitch? profitsharing in baseball like the other big sports leagues (NFL, NBA), there's yer damn pitch! Hey George, can you put a Yankee uniform on one of these machines? Give it a shot, old boy! (sheesh)
talk about a good use for a PIII 850. I was thinking a game server. I guess you could use it to throw a couple of balls.
Will this machine use Crisco and sandpaper as it starts to age?
"Are you trying to say that Jesus Christ can't hit a curveball?"
The targetting systems are accurate enough to track a dove flying in front of home plate a la Randy Johnson
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Remember all those industrial revolution fables of man versus machine, like Paul Bunyan and John Henry? If I recall correctly, the moral of the stories was that even the best of any field were eventually beaten by machines that anyone could wield, and that the old-fashioned way of doing things eventually died out.
So, now we have a machine that can theoretically pitch better than any pitcher, living or dead - that will always place the ball wherever it wants, and that can keep a database on each player's weak pitches and patterns that screw them up.
The question is - why keep pitchers at all? When society realized that it was better to plow with a tractor than a bunch of oxen, we got rid of the oxen. When we realized that it was better to manufacture and box crayons with robotics than with third-world child labor, we did that, too. So -
What is the intrigue of seeing someone pitch a baseball, now, in a fashion that we know is not the best?
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
And let's not get into Pentium floating point error issues. The mere thought of broken bones and bruises from that make me cringe.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Then the Twins will find one just as good for 1/10 of the price. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
1. Tradition
2. "The crack of the bat" is a much more elegant thing to say than "the dink of the bat"
3. Tradition
4. Guys like Sosa and Griffey could potentially kill a pitcher or third-base coach if you let them hit with metal bats
5. Tradition
6. It's absolutely hillarious entertainment when a good pitch breaks the bat of a cheater, and we see shards of cork fly all over the field.
7. Tradition
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Besides, it's kind of cheap to start by saying "he took steroids" only to parenthetically acknowledge that actually, he did not. Let me cut the redundant text by rephrasing your second sentence:
Mark McGwire was not takeing steroids the year he set the home-run record.
Much shorter, much more accurate.
Carefully chosing the right foods would have had the exact same effect as McGwire's daily clump of nutrient powder. That crap is really just a quick-n-dirty alternative to eating the same health-food entree every damn day. It's not at all the same thing as taking artificial hormone pills.
Besides, why get worked up over a record that Bonds is probably going to shatter this year anyway?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Why does it need a P3 @ 850mhz? I would think that at most a 50mhz machine would do fine. Sounds like a waste of money to me
Can we overclock it for faster fastballs?
......Where do you think Astro-Glide got its name (and no, I don't know the real reason they invented this product, but I have some ideas)
I say the Indians draft it right away.
Yeah, or it has Jason Kendall dropping routine fly balls out in left :)
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
Coming from a baseball fan, I don't see how an 8-axis robot is going to imitate real MLB pitchers, considering that there's much more than the simple location and velocity of a given pitch.
I can't see a robot imitating the movement of a Tim Wakefield knuckler, or the movement on a Hideo Nomo split-finger.
There are just too many variables, I would think, for this truly be of signifcant use for a hitter.
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
Yup... think catchers' mitts, batting helmets, and the suit of armor that the catcher and umpire wear. Padding in baseball isn't as prevalent as it is in some other sports (football, hockey) but it certainly plays a role.
Much like the space program, in fact...
when he charges the mound.
i could live a little longer in this prison
A perfect batting machine would be cool too for pitchers who need some practice! Also, use it to train the whole team - you could have perfect pops and setups for the team to practice with.
The machine could be height adjusted, etc...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
This is how the terrifing future depicted in Death Race 2000 began. Will we all just sit by idly while it happens?
I blame Intel.
This reminds me of a cartoon in Ray Kurzwiel's Book "Age of Spiritual Machines" where a guy representing the human race is in a room with papers. Written on each paper is a task that was once thought to be doable only by a human. The guy keeps discarding them as computers prove to be able to do the tasks.
"Only humans can play baseball"
right....
Not to mention that you must not know how to pronounce it either - there are TWO n's in sentiment - or are you some hick who actually pronounces it sediment? ;)
Doh. Never could spell.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
I have to disagree with the sediment. I think they mix quite well. I think improvements in sports medicine have added to games, keeping some of the greats in the game longer, allowing people to get familiar.
It also does something else, it allows geeks to compete in professional sports, though not directly, I could see it as a source of pride to have designed the exercise program that made your team the forth quarter terrors. Or to develope a machine that helps some player recover and extend his career.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
You know, that argument is really a bunch of shit. How do you explain that the Orioles spend almost as much and get no results (~$115 Mil)? What about the Mets (~$110)? With a couple of exceptions like Mussina and Knobs, some of their best players came up through the Yankee farm system (Soriano, Pettite, Jeter). They use their money to bring in names, but they use more of their money to keep the players that are producing.
BOSTON SUCKS!
Your post is awfully narrow minded. If not for the content of it then for the Go Red Sox part! :) Go Yanks BTW!!!
:) ) but sports research does have a realistic ROI in at least some cases.
I'm only kidding but you saying we're wasting money on sports research is the same as those rednecks who say NASA is the black hole of money. Why do I say that? Well, my sister-in-law had to have arthroscopic surgery on her knee after a skiing snafu and she is 100% back after only 6 months. Where do you think they perfected that technique? Why are those sneakers you wear into work everyday so comfy? When we send food to Africa how do you think we know how to pack as much nutrition into as small a package as possible? Those are only the tip of the ice berg (thats my excuse for being unable to come up with anything else
BOSTON SUCKS!
Let's forget practical applications for a second. Even more interesting are the things this baby can do which a regular pitcher can't. Take your regular curveball, but increase the speed of spin by oh, let's say a factor of 100 and then make a contest to see who can hit it. Imagine a pitch breaking the sound-barrier. I'm sure that would have some fairly interesting instant-replay effects. Aside: ... 3D graphics eh? Would be interesting to get beaned by DoomGuy or QuakeGuy or some swimsuit model.
The article makes an excellent point that mlb batters used it for two pitches more than any others. It seems that for this machine to be a useful training device it would have to behave more like a real pitcher. Evaluate the batter and control its own pitch selection within some predefined bounds.
That would be interesting AI programming.
Have you ever heard the story of the old baseball, when the fields were huge and irregular, people wore little to no padding, and most importantly there were not ten zillion geeks roaming like ants over the fields of sports medicine and sports technology in order to ramp up everything to the conceivable maximum?
You know, we draw the line on steroids and such for some reason, but allow other drugs; we outlaw aluminum bats for Little Leaguers but we let people invest millions in designing a better nutrient regimen for sports teams.
The bigger baseball biz gets, the more home run races we will want to see and the farther and farther science will push baseball from the sport that you can see played each weekend at Little League and weekender team fields around the world.
I don't think that a computer can do any thing except put coaches into comeptition with each other for the best equipment and force pitching, hitting and coaching into a computer-determined standardization.
Fuck a bunch of that.
P.S. GO RED SOX!
Goat sex free since 2001
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Does their code throw exceptions?
That's not even funny.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
I'm a runner. I enjoy watching track meets. I know that there is an easier to get from point A to point B than running. I'm not much of a fan of NASCAR.
I enjoy watching (and doing myself) the human element of an athletic event. The screw ups, the over compensation, or under compensation. Sure, a pitching machine could do all the work - but where's the fun in that?
espo
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espo
.. the AMD "I am rapidly stealing your market share" fastball?
Who else wants to hook this thing up to Triple Play 2001?
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The better question is, when will we see the robo-mullet? It's something that's been overlooked for years...
If it's supposed to move and doesn't, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.
The best pitches are the ones that make the batter reach or hit into a predetermined part of the field. If the robots AI were to have the ability to choose which pitches where and when then it may be a "smart robot" but it'll get taken for yard every pitch. Unless it has Jason Kendall calling the shots for it :o)
No, I'm from Chicago.
"From of old, there are not lacking things that have attained Oneness." - Lao Tzu
strap a mullet and a bad mustache to this thing and you've got yourself a relief pitcher.
I think the 4th robot rule should be:
A robot shall not have a mullet.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
I wonder how long until Randy Johnson gets control of the machine, and John Kruk to step into the batter's box .... a la '93 All-Star Game.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
For a company like Intel that's used to throwing huge curveballs at its customers and other developers, it's good to see that they can finally vary it up a bit.