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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."
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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?"
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
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
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...
They still haven't made a computer that can hit the ball... this requires significantly more smarts to do in the general case.
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.
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.
All we need now is a robotic batter. Baseball has never been so much fun!
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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
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?
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.
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....
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!
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
Does their code throw exceptions?
That's not even funny.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
It's not going to perfectly replace a real pitcher, but it will give batters a chance to hit against something more akin to real pitching than either the 50 mph softballs they get during batting practice, or a one pitch only pitching machine. Plus, you can hit against 90 mph pitches all day without having to wear out some poor sap's arm