Slashdot Mirror
Mathematica and BattleBots
hesheboy writes "Wolfram.com has a story about building a battlebot with Mathematica: 'October 28, 2002--Looking for action with brains-over-brawn appeal? William McHargue, a freelance physicist and long-time Mathematica user, is one of many who find this combination in BattleBots, the new fighting-robot craze. "With BattleBots, one can be aggressive and yet nobody gets hurt," says McHargue. Recently, McHargue was featured in Mechanical Engineering magazine for work on Tesla's Tornado, his BattleBot.'"
...remember that Wolfram.com the site on which the story resied == Mathematica. The company whose product Mathematica is. So, do not expect to see something unprejudiced. It's an interesting story anyway :)
What I mean is (drawing on real-life examples) that while bacteria and viruses (yes it's spelled viruses, see here), I don't really think that's what we are looking for when doing battlebots.
for the longest time, rambots (bots that basically has a lot of power and a wedge shape) would win consistently. This guy's little contraption is not much different. the bot still depends on a very rudamentary skill to attack / defend. - the only difference is that he usese Mathematica for modelling vs. say, ProE (which I think would be better anyhow).
real brain over brawn would be, let's say, an (almost) universal manipulator, and enough sensors, reactory circuits, and capability that the robot will make reasonable decisions to duck, block, parry, jump, or just (calculatedly) take an attack, and then be able to exploit the other robot's weakness at the same time.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
So when can I expect to hear the annoucement of a BattleBot weighing in at 3.141592653589793238462643383279 pounds?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
.....Is to design an evolutionary program that would pick some basic designs (wedge, saw, spin, etc...) and have them do battle several thousand times then use natural selection to mix the properties of the most successful robots and greate a new generation of robots then repeat as many times as possible till you get a robot that is a highly evolved killing machine.
I don't think this would be incredibly hard to do. They I believe they already had a computer evolve a robot that could walk so now we need to evolve a robot that can Smash.Oh and i'd be coold if it could steal the defeated robot's parts and build onto itself. I suppose that would put it over the weight limitations though.
On second thought they'd probably just start hunting human beings and that wouldn't be cool at all. Guess I'll just put down the wratchet and the C compiler and goto bed.
ThunderBird. Nuff said.
I too heard is has been canned. It seems strange, since it has replaced WWF as the dorm's TV of choice for the male-soap-opera.
Now what are they going to do? Build things with Mathematica?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I'm a physicist. I've used Mathematica. I think it's a great program.... But, I don't like Wolfram's politics. He and CalTech had their battle back in the day about the engine that makes symbolic math possible. Wolfram won, now he's running the big proprietary business.
Are there any nice Free or Open Source alternatives. I know that maple and matlab do this stuff to some extent, but I don't know their licenses. Seems like there should be a project. That software is expensive as crap.
Does it really matter what software he uses? I think that the robot itself is the only interesting thing, not which software he uses to model it... It's like me running a story on how I wrote my latest software project in C. wow
This sentence no verb
Found on Google: the official website.
Looking for action with brains-over-brawn appeal? Slash A. Bot, a career Open Source advocate and long-time Linux user, is one of many who find this combination in Slashdot, the new trolling craze. "On Slashdot, one can be aggressive and yet nobody gets hurt," says McHargue. Recently, Mr. Bot was featured in Geeks magazine for work on Tesla's Trolling Tornado, his BattleBot Linux Distribution.'
I am a postdoc and run a research unit in a physics lab. If I hire someone and he starts giving me political bullshit about our exclusive use of Windows and Windows applications, he'd better be damn good at what he does or he'll be out in a minute for disrupting the peace in the group.
Get the right tool for the job. Period. We don't have time to teach new students to use Linux or other free software. In fact, we don't have any reason to do so. Create plots with SigmaPlot or Origin, use Matlab and Excel to analyse the data and write your reports and papers in Word so that the coauthors can read and modify your text without having to learn a programming language (TeX/LaTeX). And no, the export and import functions in StarOffice/OpenOffice do not work properly.
If the rules are so strict, this raises a legal question for most mathematical software. Consider this scenario: Due to a bug (which could have been accidental), mathematica reports an "unsafe" value to a "safe" value.
2. McHargue uses this unsafe laser in his bot.
3. Somebody gets hurt by viewing his fight.
Legally who is responsible? Wolfram? McHargue? The organisers? What???
"Do something man. Right now."
Don't know about Battlebots, but UK Robot Wars isn't looking like getting pulled any time soon. And even if it was, it's spawned a robot underground - there are plenty of unofficial events going on all the time. You don't need TV endorsement to make a hobby worthwhile :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
> Please do not look into laser with remaining good eye.
~some things just have to be said.... this just might not be one of them.
www.melbotwars.com
Can be used with the FREE Maya PLE
"MelBotWars is a real-time dynamics competition involving autonomous virtual robots that fight each other using rigidBody dynamics in Maya."
It's developed by the guys from ILM
There is one GPL'd CAS system which is pretty well developed. Maxima. It is a descendent of Macsyma, which is described as the older brother of Maple and Mathematica. Apparently Macsyma left MIT, became proprietary, then the corporation died. However, MIT sent one code base to DOEnergy, and that DOE code base was recovered and released under the GPL in 1999 (which is probably why most of us have not heard from it. Rather fascinating history (well, I think so).
http://maxima.sourceforge.net
>Hundreds of thousands die of starvation and malaria every year.
Tens of millions, in fact. 60,000,000 -> 80,000,000, depending on which charity you listen to.
3000+ die every day in the US from obesity related illnesses.
The OP is just a twat with no clue - interrupted from his Nintendo playing and drug taking just long enough to go `hey, who turned the light on`, mumble a little racist rant - he's learn well from his two minutes hate - then return to his playing, utterly ignorant of the fact that his knee jerk reaction will ensure nothing changes, and that his children will be asking the same questions when they in turn are affected by their generations WTC in 20 years time. Only that one won't be limited to just a few thousand people.
I don't care about the software he uses. The design is neat. It's the first spinnerbot that I know of that spins the entire chassis instead of just shell.
To do this the wheels that the bot spins on have to brake at precise intervals to provide the ability to do anything but just sit there and spin. That means he probably has some form of onboard computing.
BattleBots is neat but one of the things that's always detracted from it in my mind is that the bots always seemed like big, strong, remote controlled cars with no intelligence. This seems like a small step towards intelligence and may actually raise the bar.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
"In the BattleBox, Tesla's Tornado is a 117.9-pound block of spinning, smashing steel"
Anyone know how much Katz weighs? If it is more than 117.9 pounds, just imagine the possibilities!
It shouldn't be too hard to retrofit him with the appropriate wheels and circuitry. Just imagine the possibilities of a spinning, smashing Jon Katz!
(woah...and what if we made a Beowulf cluster of 'em)
"Whether or not you believe me, I'm right" -RWF
Is that once the robot's unconquerable might is proven in Mathematica, it becomes unnecessary to actually build the device.
;)
"An excercise for the student", I believe they call it.
Have a loook here
Damn it is impossible to delete posts in slashdot. I meant this link
BattleBot's rapid rise may actually be what helps kill it.
I remember back in 1994 when Robot Wars started here in San Francisco at Fort Mason, it was a big C.F.
I think it was in 1996(?) that they finally added the plexiglass barriers (only 6 feet or so, but it was better than the knee high barrier before that. The name changed sometime between 1997-1999, but I was not following it much at that time.
Comedy Central first filmed the June 2000 event (Season I) which was now a whole weekend and would become what we know today.
From the humble beginings Robot Wars grew in size, eventually came corporate sponsorship and with Comedy Central came advertisers.
Comedy Central played with time slots for quite some time, never quite gettng it right (I never understood the property being on that network anyway, but I wasn't complaining that I could see it) and they cancelled this year.
The worst part is that the event has grown so big, it can not support itself without the financial backing it received and it's doubtful the event will continue unless it gets picked up by another network (Hey, SciFi channel, hint hint). I'm bummed because I finally had my design for a bot, but I don't want to build it without a venue to play. Whats worse are the people who are already in construction of bots for the next event and those tweaking prior bots as well.
I'd also love to see season 5 with Gary Coleman. (Strange, I know, but I used to play Photon [a laser tag game] against Gary Colemna in Westminister, CA back in 1988).
Oh, by the way it was the New Kind of Science book, not the Mathematica book that I read ;)
At any rate, I found some cool analysis tools that people should check out as alternatives to Mathematica for analysis and visualization of everything from battlebots to cellular automata. Without further ado:
- PDL
- R
- PGPlot
- GRASS
(just to name a few)PDL is the most directly analagous to Mathematica or Matlab. R is, of course, like S/S+. PGPlot is for visualization. Grass is mostly for geostatistics/GIS. But it's cool enough to throw in the mix.
Anyhow, hope this helps someone out. Go forth and make a battlebot.
Wow! Can I send Slashdot a press release too?
If you're looking for a BattleBots for the masses, head over to Botbattle and try it. You program a bot in a basic-like language and watch it fight. It's kind of cool.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
An open-source multiuser "arena" runtime is only a matter of time.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
at least an intro version, that lets you play with simple problems dealt with in the book
CLITORIS CHOPPING ADVOCATE! Long time no see Sudanese genital multilator supporter! ;p How are you October_69th? You piece of fucking loser shit. I know you and your types. The communist is back. I know you and how you want to purify yourself on the alter of intellectual debate. I know you think you are smarter and should think for everyone and democracy is bad and that we should atone. I know you do nothing and you are a professional academic and that is sadly a contradiction in terms. I know no one has ever benefited from your work, you don't have to prove yourself, and that you stand on the shoulder of many men with a crushing boot as do your 1st world friends. We all do. But somehow you get absolution from being evil, you are better; you are a deeper thinker and are somehow not a party to this evil dance of greed and decadence. You fucking anti right wing types, by no mean would I condone fascism, but ultra left wingers and ultra right wingers are religious zealots. They wash themselves of blame and use human sacrifice to prove they are right. You are a fear monger, and a naysayer. But Red October_30th, you never prove yourself. You hide in school, hiding from the proving grounds. You enjoy life; you expect to live 3 times longer than most people on earth. You think you want it equal for everyone one, but you will give up none of the accoutrements and amenities of the 1st world lifestyle, while you spit venomous remarks at your enemies the right wing establishment, but you theories about cabals of men raping the world, well, whatever you theorize about you are a party to so fuck off. You vile scum. I wanted to ask you how it feels to put the diapers back on a baby you just raped? Look at the communist left wing Bund, rules by intellectuals, and this lead to the power base of V I Lenin to crush the life out of hundreds of millions of people for almost a century. Real good left wing establishment, the soviet empire. You are such a clouded thinker. Democracy may not be the best, but mobocratic revolutions lead to thought policing, and capitalism breed a daily voting system that the stupid and smart all partake in, voting thousands of times a day with your wallet. And those who detract from such a system are generally inferior. They claim to not being able to get a break but they don't try. Like you don't 'October,' the pussy behind the veil. You don't like a system which makes you look pathetic, you never published, you don't have a patent, you never helped anyone, you only make enough to feed yourself and you greedy needs, you will never affect another man. And charity? I have taken many under my wing and show them how to fish metaphorically whenever I can, but your bourgeois Volvo driving liberal asshole don't want to take the time out of your day to teach a man to fish, you want the government to do it all for you, and raise your kids, and pay for your health while you suck down cigarettes and blame it on the government and evil business. Think of WW2, think of all the people who had no choice and died. 55 million people dies, and more would have had not the biggest evil capitalists come in a kicked fucking ass. And that we did. USSR, 11 million dead. Germany 4 million. Japan 1.4 million. The USA? 300,000 dead. We kick fucking ass. We saved you and your fucking little pit's neck. Now that the average age of the world is half that of how many years have passed since then most of you liberal idiots have forgotten that you and your Volvos and you free thinking and all that shit would be dead, and you'd either have grown up in a Hugo Boss Hitler youth suit or in a stupid piece of shit clothing made by the USSR with seams falling out, wishing for blue jeans.
I was in USSR in 1991. I doubt you've ever been, and even during glasnost/perestroika the place was a fucking dump. Go to Moscow now, the mafia does a better job than left wing commies. And that holds true. Left wing thinkers are lower than the mafia because they justify everything.
I can't believe you sit on your pulpit, unproven, unmarried, and not responsible for anyone but yourself allowed to masturbate yourself all day long, with the implements of greed. A full stomach, an easy non labor life, DVD players, a fucking computer and an internet connection. Then you come out and kick the balls of the very engine that provides everything that is real to you. Everything you look at is a product of entrepreneurship and genius - both. Sometimes, when a guy like Howard Hughes has both, the results are rather interesting, but most of the time the innovators and the entrepreneurs work hand in hand to deliver, something you were never a part of because you are inferior and you hide in academia unproven and spout your vicious epithets from your perch where you frothing rabid thoughtless speech wafts into the air largely unheard, your snarky self congratulating style is hated by all. I want to kick you in the testicle sack and sodomize you with a broom handle. I want you to feel the burning pain of something in your ass. That is how the 3rd world feels every day, but you claim to know nothing about that ass-pain. But you are a cause of it. You vote with your presence in a society. You are a part of the collective, and if you think those less fortunate consider your defense of them, they are too fucking STUPID to even differentiate and advocate from an evil oppressor. You mother-fuckers walk a thin line. The line is between stupidity and insanity.
So now the anti government anti free society lunatic and terrorist supporter comes to Slashdot to troll, to quip and chime in with his thought policing. From the Bund, the communist union left wing shop. Even Albert Einstein, god bless him, was a member of the communist party. He would have been a highly intelligent accomplished but completely unfit for public leadership - which is why he largely stayed out of politics. But without entrepreneurship and a free society, the money and equipment to verify his theories would have never come to pass. Why did my Einstein live in the USA, in Princeton NJ? Why not Russia? When did Russia EVER beat the west to proving and or utilizing Einstein's theories? Well, you see left wing death organizations like USSR and the EU, which is turning out to be a force of evil with their anti Turkish and Anti Israeli racist elitist attitude, is a similar fucking hole. A bunch of decadent, self fucking mental masturbatory mother fuckers Oedipus slime molds who sit around and spout trash while their own racist anti entrepreneur system crumbles and the third world is as pissed off as ever.
You god damn bitch, why do you come here and shit on these threads, you defecate and eructate forth such crap with your snarky one liners and you deprecated method of thinking. You communist friends are gone, the lost. Fucking Moscow is a better capitalist than you. And if you think that legislated mediocrity, world "equality (doesn't exist as all humans are equal in the eyes of law but in terms of aptitude and usefulness to others, there is no equality, it's a gigantic strata)" is something that people want, fuck you, no one wants it, they all want everything from themselves, as you do but you deny it. I hate you, and I want to kick your testicles.
The baby-fucking pedophile death bringing terrorist cunt mother fucker Oedipus Rexxed out communist idiot with his Volvo and his bike path is back. He is a rapist, a terrorist, and killer.
DO not trust this man, he has been known to say things that lead to the justification of rape, mass killings, thought policing, societal cleansing. He is a typical proto fascist/communist/dictator, and the far left and far right meet at the bottom of a circle where Red October_30th is positioned.
"I love Saturday morning cartoons, what classic humour! This is what ... Idiots, explosives and falling anvils."
entertainment is all about
-- Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...