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Deep Green - A Pool Playing Robot?
o0zi writes "A Canadian scientist has created another game-playing machine, designed for a far simpler purpose than chess: playing pool. The world's first pool-playing robot consists of a slim box that glides along tracks above a pool table, and shoots using a camera-guided cue. Deep Green pots only half the shots it plans for - supposedly the same as a below average player - but this is expected to improve."
My first thought was that it should be very easy to get a higher percentage of shots, but I guess that a lot of shots require 'english' to make, probably something that is not easily computed.
Having recently tried snooker for the first time, I can appreciate the difficulty!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
a pool CLEANING robot.
or at least something that can clean for me.
A Canadian scientist has created another game-playing machine, designed for a far simpler purpose than chess: playing pool.
Far simpler perhaps, in ways. The strategy behind a pool game might be easier compared to chess, but there's nothing physical in chess that needs simulating. That's a whole new ball game (ha!) for a computer/robot over a chess simulation.
This looks up there with the research into teaching robots to walk, scale stairs & run. Good solid research sure, but I wouldn't go putting it down by comparing it to a chess simulation.
Wouldn't an overhead camera have worked a lot better and been simpler to make, not to mention not violating the rule about sitting on the table?
At last: a pool opponent who doesn't spend the entire match distracting you by chalking their cue!
I wonder if it will be able to beat Kasparov?
But what is the SIGnificance?
Also there is less recognition for shots in pool because strategies are different compared to where you play. The base rules system is easier than chess, but you have near-infinite possibilities for aligning shots, taking shots and winning. If you're playing someone who can sink the table on a streak, the robot had better be able to do the same. Plus there's breaking... does the bot know how to break a rack and sink a couple each time? If not, it's not a very good pool bot, whereas it doesn't take much these days to create a chess bot that is *amazing* at chess by even pro standards. They have all the stats from previous games to go by. Stats won't help a robot with billiards, as there are no coordinates recorded to base new calulations on. Perhaps there *should* be? I think it would be fairly easy to record coords from each pro game from this day forward and the billiards industry should invent a table that does it. That would be awesome for so many reasons.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Interesting question: could you ever be truly happy with a 'copy-cat' human-like robot (or dog, cat) as a partner/friend, that looks like, smells like, behaves like a real human?
Personally, I will always prefer the real thing, flesh and blood, but a good copy could be fun company...
Now they only need to make a robot that sucks at golf. Of course, important aspects of the design will include a synthesized "FUCK! God DAMMIT! Stupid fucking sandtrap!" on 50% of shots made.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
here is a homepage of an author of the project which also includes a picture of a robot.
> how clean your balls are
Mine are pretty clean. How about yours?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
OLD News by decades! (what about Silent Running!)
In the movie it features and shows the first billiards playing robot. Mind you it was no doubt laboriously programmed to take its shots using CADCAM coordinates rather than optical feedback.
But it was first... in early 1970's.
Of course 3D chess by Lucas in Star Wars years later out classed the entertainment on the ship Valely Forge in Silent Running.
I can't believe I am the first to point this out here, and I'm not even a true uber geek of techie culture.
I know that some engineers at my Uni (Adelaide University) made the same kind of thing a few years back. I don't know too many details (or a webpage), but it was about as good as this one appears to be.
Where's the 'aimjuice' aka beer intakes on this baby? Not to mention, does it smoke and enjoy country music as well? What about karaoke!?
ALL IM ASKING IS THAT IT PARTICIPATE WITH THE REST OF US HUMANS.
Mod me down as robot-insensitive.
Any British /.ers remember a Horizon[1] episode where they built a snooker playing robot. Must have been 10/15 years ago now. Played on a reduced size table with fewer balls (10 rather than 15 reds IIRC). The gantry for the robo-cue included steel pillars at the corners of the table, thus making it really hard for the human competitor.
[1] Horizon is a science program on BBC2.
to use genetic algorithms to improve the robocue efficiency?
Maybe toss in a little fuzzy logic for good measure.
But does it run linux?
Right Here!
designed for a far simpler purpose than chess: playing pool.
This comment shows the poster has no idea what playing pool is about.
It's more than just line up / aim at the center of the ball / shoot more or less hard : you have to pot the ball, yes, but you also have to replace your white ball so that the next shot is easier. Often you have to think 2, 3, 4 shots ahead. Often you plan your entire game before playing the first shot.
In order to control the white ball, there's a certain about of spin to give it on the vertical plan and horizontal plan (english) so that the ball is deflected differently on the cushion(s), depending on the angle they arrive. Giving english to a ball also deflect its path (it won't roll straight), so that has to be accounted for in the aiming (you aim a little off). And then all tables don't react the same, some have newer, less "grabby" cloths than others... Then there's the roughness of the cue tie and the chalk, and the suppleness of the cue's wood that affects greatly how much english is put on the ball. Then of course there are all the "special" shots, like massés, that require a lot of practive to control... etc...
Playing pool is a LOT more complex than chess, and that's not just because it involves real physics. The problem has many many variables, and it takes many years of practice to master. I've been playing for 20 years, at least 2 hours per day, and I still couldn't beat a professional. It's a very demanding game.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
.."Then there is the challenge of teaching a computer to master the strategy of billiards -- how to sink a ball while setting up another winner shot or thwarting your opponent."..
Haaaa! He hasn't even done the minimax thing with it yet. Pathetic, says I!
KIRO is an autonomous table soccer robot developed at University Freiburg.
s h/index.html
http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~kiro/engli
Deep Blue now Deep Green *YAWN* someone wake me up when we see Deep Pink the nympho robot.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
My pool playing is likewise below average, except when I've had a few pints and I start clearing tables. No, I don't understand it either. Do you think the robot would play better if somebody tipped a pint of beer over it?
Sounds like someone watched/read a bit too much of "2001: A Space Odyssey", didn't that have a pool playing robot in it? or I'm I mistaken? It's been a number of years since I've seen the movie.
I also recall it missing a shot or two.
Wow... something that cool happening in my city!
I'm going to have to hunt this robot out and see this.
The world's first snooker playing robot was the subject of a QED programme shown on 16th March 1988 on BBC TV in which the 1988 world snooker champion, Steve Davis, played and won a match against the robot. I helped to develop the image-processing software for the robot's vision system. The research project ran from 1986-1988 and was funded by BBC TV. There is further information about the project here.
Scroogle
"Let's play the adding game. Which can add faster, a calculator or a woman or a man?. The calculator can, right?...[My} point is that if you light a match near a calculator it's not going to scurry away. If there's a fire in my living room where me and my calculator are sitting, I can escape the fire, but my calculator can't!"
--Moxy Fruvous (good, funny band), commenting on Kasparov vs. Deep Blue
Beauty will lure a man into bed, but it won't bring him back a second time, unless he's awfully young or very stupid.
http://users.telerama.com/~megabee/images/pimpbot
An average player will miss 3 out of 4 shots. But most average players don't play that much.
To a computer, pool is a much simpler game than chess. It would be an advancement in robotics to engineer an autonomous pool-playing robot, but this project seems geared more towards creating an automatic pool table than any sort of adaptable robot (i.e. one that could play pool in any situation at any table, rather than only in one setting at one specific table) or computer program.
If that's all they want, why bother mounting a stationary robot on a pool table? Why not just buy a video pool machine...
A small correction of the summary; I do believe he's an engineer, not a scientist. In fact, you'll see the URL is hosted off the electrical and computer engineering faculty site.
Q: What's green, and if it falls out of a tree and lands on you it could kill you?
A: A pool table.
This has been done before to some degree with a robot called Iron Willie by a company called Predator whom used the robot to create low deflection cues and empirically measure how "accurate" cue designs were. Predator Cues are to pool what high dollar putters are to golf. These cues utilize a pie wedge design in the shaft combined with a stiff taper and lightweight, short ferrule to decrease deflection and maximize energy transfer to the cueball. Many people report a 10-20 percent improvement when they start using a predator shaft on their cue. In fact, more professional players choose to play with predator shafts without sponsorship than any other cue on the market. The truly exciting thing about this invention is the fact that it will be used to create better pool equipment for independent testing. this robot will be much more flexible than iron willie and will be able to measure the performance of cues on a much lower level I'd imagine. Plus, i imagine the robot to be much more flexible than iron willie who simlpy can be setup to shoot the same shot over and over. Pool is such a complex game that it will be very difficult for the robot to get such concepts as sacrifice safeties and intentional fouls. Other games like one pocket, the pool equivalent of chess, will be really difficult to grasp for a computer since its very common to "sacrifice" a ball to your opponent for the good of the game. Read more about one pocket here
Goodness... our poor server may survive....
I must admit that is pleasing to have our project on slashdot. It's been a fun project and is getting me a M.Sc out of it :P.
Having a pool table in your lab is a lot of fun on friday afternoons.
For those /.'s interested the robot should be playing a game entirely on its own in the spring. We are still very much in the early stages of development, but we have made lots of progress over the last 16 months from when the gantry was delivered.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Dude, Deep Purple rox!
http://www.commaecho.com
The cool thing about this robot is that it learns from experience: it watches to see where the ball goes, learns a model of how that depends on its stroke parameters, and tries to compute a better way to sink it next time. As pointed out by another poster, it doesn't plan ahead to the next shot, which is an important aspect of the game.
OK, not that anyone will care... But the name "Deep Green" is already taken. Deep Green is a Chess app for the Newton, and up until somewhat recently, was the best PDA Chess app around.
:)
So there.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Hey...I watched the "The Color of Money" starrring Ton Cruise and Paul Neuman - I know all about Pool Hustlng.
I don't know how well the two compare. The chess problem to me seems to mainly be exploiting what computers do well (doing vast numbers of computation with blinding speed and a perfect ability to "remember" all the possible permutations and outcomes). Chess is essentially a "math" game, there is no functional difference between the coded representation the computer manipulates to determine its moves and the physical board a player plays on. Hence, the computer's strengths give it a very real and critical advantage - I can't project more than a few moves ahead with any exactness, I can't keep a perfect visualization of every permutation of possible game fields in my mind, I can all too easily make a stupid move that a computer would never make (and, if I make it, will never fail to exploit).
On the other hand, while in theory pool may be a relatively simple game of angles, it occurs in the messy, chaotic world of real physics where surfaces are imperfectly elastic and the odd variations of spin and friction will create very complex effects. Ideally the computer-assisted robot has certain benefits - totally correct perception of angles and distances, ability to control the exact angle and velocity of the strike - but the human being is uniquely suited for transacting these messy physical transactions in the real world.
I don't know if the comparison to chess is putting this reseach down, but it is probably rather an apples and oranges situation. The chess problem is primarily one of raw computational strength carefully programmed for a very specific goal. This is much more, as you say, attacking the problem of getting a computer to be able to negotiate the not-so-easily described (in a way a computer can deal with) problems of physical reality. Pretty neat.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
OK, I'll start the game:
Marco!
Put this together with some AI and it will be able to learn to get better itself! The more it play the more it will learn and never miss a shot.
How many bands do you know that post _all_ their lyrics on their websites? Darn nice guys.
http://www.fruvous.com/ln-lyr.html#kasparov
Beauty will lure a man into bed, but it won't bring him back a second time, unless he's awfully young or very stupid.
I think I should challenge the OrionRobots people to build one. We could have a pool tournament in the local Mr Q's in East Finchley.
This will be an interesting challenge. I can already see many different designs, ones on legs, ones on wheels - or even ones on rails around the table - though I mighty disallow the rails...
The nice thing about a pool table is that you have bright coloured balls ona distinctive green (or blue in some cases) background. This makes it a little easier for working things out. A robot may be able to crane over the table with its camera, and then project trajectories.
Of course- these Candian guys would be welcome to the challenge!
Anyone with any other ideas for robot challenges could propose them at our Challenge Proposal Forum.
And yes - I am a total robot geek!
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol