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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.
No.
Use the right tool for the right job. Choosing software based on politics is like choosing a hammer for its smell.
Also, Mathematica does nothing for you that you couldn't do yourself with a pencil and some paper. Convenience costs money. If you can't afford it, you must not really need it.
Found on Google: the official website.
If you want something like matlab that is open source (GPL) you can take a look at Octave (www.octave.org). Nothing symbolic in the basic design, but maybe some component that is symbolic and runs in octave? I hav'nt looked into that program that much.
"Do something man. Right now."
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.
I've used all 4 main tools: Mathematica, Maple, Mathcad, and Matlab. All 4 have their various strengths and weaknesses. Overall, if I had to choose one as "the best or most comprehensive", I'd have to choose Mathematica. Now, if only symbolic math is important to you, then try Maple. It's a good product and strong with symbolic math. You can download a free demo from them.
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
I do not know of any OSS 'symbolic' maths program out there, but there is a very competent matlab close called Octave (www.octave.org).
It uses the good old Fortran kick-ass linalg libraries for counting and gnuplot for the graphics.
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.
Freedom has no price. The right tool for humanity is freedom. You can ignore that fact and freeride from the hard work lots of "irrational idiots" that are sacrificing themselves to provide you freedom.
.doc, .xls problem. The right tool for the job costs everyone in the world $400 to just be able to use the standard documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Hey, this is not theoretical. The "right tool for the job" today may have a huge impact in what you can do in the future. Look at the
But your tip is aprecciated, because there will always be people working for your freedom for free.
unfinished: (adj.)
The problem is that it is proprietary software and there are arguments against that in general.
Yes... but those arguments are universally laughed at by those of us who understand that computers are tools to be used to accomplish productive work, and who believe that people who deliberately choose an inferior tool because it comes with source code deserve what they get.
The general arguments against proprietary software, most of which were advanced by Stallman, are all really unconvincing.
Everyone in high energy physics uses unix basically.
Everyone in medicine and biology uses Windows or Mac, in about a 50/50 (at most 60/40) fraction. If you try and break out Gnuplot and LaTeX in a medical or biological research facility and you'll probably be politely told to use tools that are compatible with what everybody else uses. If you then start talking about politics... well, see the above poster who talked about research assistants being fired for making a nuisance of themselves.
I write in my journal
Freedom of speech means you are free to voice your opinion without fear (you can shout "The King is a Fink" in public and not be arrested). So why are you an anonymous coward? Why should anyone take what you say seriously if you're afraid to admit you said it?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
An open-source multiuser "arena" runtime is only a matter of time.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.