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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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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