4 ms·

Here's the code: https://github.com/UoMResearchIT/Gryphon/blob/main/gryphon.py https://github.com/UoMResearchIT/Gryphon/blob/main/gryphon.p... Based on a brief

Here's the code: https://github.com/UoMResearchIT/Gryphon/blob/main/gryphon.py https://github.com/UoMResearchIT/Gryphon/blob/main/gryphon.p... Based on a brief read, it looks like the "breakthrough" is discarding the two measurements in a point group that are the furthest outliers from the mean. That can't be it, can it? Because that's an afternoon's work for an intern, not a breakthrough.

madengr 5y ago
More accuracy may be better, but I’d like to see a quick method of extracting analytic geometry from a 3D scan. We have laser scanners and Faro arms at work, and in the end it’s a person manually entering the geometry into Solidworks as the point cloud is useless.
TeeMassive 5y ago
If it was that stimple, then why it was not implemented and/or widely used before?
- cma 5y ago
  Almost every variation on strategies like that has been used with depth data. Median filters are more popular.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  It was, but the authors have an incentive to pretend it's novel, the press has an incentive to pretend it's novel, and the patent office has an incentive to pretend it's novel.
oezi 5y ago
Too late for you to hold up the train of progress, a patent was already filed. /s
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  You being the operative word, as in 21st century, patents are the definition of holding up progress.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    That can be true, and so is the idea that if you could not reap the rewards of your inventions, you wouldn't invest the effort because it could only be a cost sink. It's more nuanced and contextual than that. That said, the patent / trademark (probably any similar system) has up and down sides
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      That's why I said "in the 21st century". As far as I studied this, patents are a really solid idea in theory, and perhaps they even worked as advertised at some point in the past. But the way they work today, they're thoroughly gamed - patent owners get the benefits, the society doesn't get its promised returns. But I agree, it's a pretty nuanced topic.
      - verdverm 5y ago
        The idea of having time and protection to recoup your investment still applies today. Being "in the 21st century" doesn't remove this trade-off nor imply that progress is held up because of patents. It could be that progress suffers more without patents. Humanity and society works better with incentives and freedom of preferences
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        I'm not questioning the idea of temporary monopoly to allow recouping investment. The idea is prima facie good. But patents aren't just legally enforced dibs; the protection is granted in exchange for giving the invention to the public. This is where the patent system doesn't live up to its obligations in practice. There's a bunch of problems that, together, make the whole greater (i.e. worse) than the sum of its parts: - In many industries, but especially in everything involving computers, patent protection is too long - so long that the invention is likely to become useless before the patent expires. Technologies develop in lock step, riff of each other. If you lock down a crucial invention, you're also locking out a whole branch of R&D that may forever remain not explored[0]. - Patents are supposed to contain enough details in them that experts in a relevant field should be able to recreate the invention from the patent text. This is not what happens, we (the public) are being cheated here. The interesting patents are more like invention hashes - they contain just enough data to identify when someone is in the vicinity of invention, but not enough data to reproduce the invention itself. - Patents are routinely awarded for things that do not have an inventive step (i.e. they aren't non-obvious). I'm willing to give some benefit of the doubt here, because ideas tend to look more obvious in hindsight, but I think we've all seen or heard examples of ridiculously obvious patents. - Patents take too long to grant. The process between inventing something and getting it patented can take 2+ years - in that time, the patented invention may be well on its way to becoming obsolete (see point 1). This encourages shotgun patenting. - Patents do not come with an obligation to actually productize an invention. Companies can, and do, patent inventions they have no interest in productizing, with the sole purpose of preventing competitors from exploring some technology or product space. This is as pure slowdown of progress as you can get. I could go on. The point is, the ideas behind a patent system aren't bad - but the implementation decayed to the point of being just another rent seeking system parasitizing society. -- [0] - It's something plainly visible in software, but perhaps software is a special case, due to existence of FLOSS. Maybe, if all software was proprietary, patents would only slow down progress. With FLOSS, nobody is waiting for patents to expire - eventually, someone will find a patent unencumbered alternative, release it for free, and the world ends up adopting that. And then ends up stuck with it, due to sheer momentum. So if that patent locked out the optimal solution to a problem, it's possible we'll never use it, because too much stuff uses the suboptimal, FLOSS version.
sacred_numbers 5y ago
Something can be remarkably simple and still a breakthrough at the same time. Handwashing, for example, is one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time despite its simplicity.
- Scene_Cast2 5y ago
  On the data side, a simple but effective algorithm is "lightweight coresets". A couple of line of NumPy, but strong guarantees and nice properties.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    Lightweight corsets (shapewear using hose-like material) were also a simple, effective breakthrough.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      It made Spanx into a ~$750M company.
- sen 5y ago
  Yes but telling people who already know how to wash their hands that they should wash them for “more than 1 second and less than 1 hour” isn’t novel, which is effectively what they’re trying to sell here. There’s nothing in this “breakthrough” that isn’t already being done anyway, and the comparison stats are completely made up. 13.8cm resolution in current scanners? Have they even used a 3D scanner made after the millennium turned?
FridayoLeary 5y ago
The fact that the article mentioned 4500% three times, twice in the title alone, kind of warned me to take their news with a pinch of salt.
dxbydt 5y ago
speaking as a humble statistician, If x is your sample, given x = {8, 3, 7, 1, 3, 9} sample mean = (8+3+7+1+3+9)/6 = 5.166, doctors mean = (1+9)/2 = 5, trimmed mean = (8+3+7+3)/4 = 5.25, median aka 50th percentile = (3+7)/2 = 5. ofcourse programmers will have none of this. They'll code up a fancy function called computeMean(x) in java or python or what have you, with proper types & unit tests & suchlike, and declare "the mean is 5.166", and call it a day. No amount of persuasion will convince them that the mean is unknown, because the population's distribution is unknown, so population mean can at-best be hypothesized to some constant c, and then you can run a hypothesis test to see if you can disprove said hypothesis at some alpha level. ofcourse with a sample size of n=6 your power will take a beating and type-2 errors will spike, but who cares about these esoterica when our famed intern has coded up the mean function itself in one afternoon! Snark aside, every summary statistic has widely varying properties. Sample means will asymptotically converge to the population ("true") mean as sample size grows. Sample means are an unbiased estimator of the population mean, so they have the mvue i.e. minimum variance, the variance decreases linearly with sample size. But that doesn't mean one should ditch biased estimators. Choosing a clearly biased estimator such as a trimmed mean instead of the sample mean, which is what they've done here, can definitely result in a huge breakthrough (at the expense of higher variance but that's ok).
uyt 5y ago
Is this better than the commonly taught ransac (random sample consensus) for rejecting outliers? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample_consensus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample_consensus

madengr 5y ago

More accuracy may be better, but I’d like to see a quick method of extracting analytic geometry from a 3D scan. We have laser scanners and Faro arms at work, and in the end it’s a person manually entering the geometry into Solidworks as the point cloud is useless.

TeeMassive 5y ago

If it was that stimple, then why it was not implemented and/or widely used before?

cma 5y ago
Almost every variation on strategies like that has been used with depth data. Median filters are more popular.
jjoonathan 5y ago
It was, but the authors have an incentive to pretend it's novel, the press has an incentive to pretend it's novel, and the patent office has an incentive to pretend it's novel.

oezi 5y ago

Too late for you to hold up the train of progress, a patent was already filed. /s

TeMPOraL 5y ago
You being the operative word, as in 21st century, patents are the definition of holding up progress.
- verdverm 5y ago
  That can be true, and so is the idea that if you could not reap the rewards of your inventions, you wouldn't invest the effort because it could only be a cost sink. It's more nuanced and contextual than that. That said, the patent / trademark (probably any similar system) has up and down sides
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    That's why I said "in the 21st century". As far as I studied this, patents are a really solid idea in theory, and perhaps they even worked as advertised at some point in the past. But the way they work today, they're thoroughly gamed - patent owners get the benefits, the society doesn't get its promised returns. But I agree, it's a pretty nuanced topic.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      The idea of having time and protection to recoup your investment still applies today. Being "in the 21st century" doesn't remove this trade-off nor imply that progress is held up because of patents. It could be that progress suffers more without patents. Humanity and society works better with incentives and freedom of preferences
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        I'm not questioning the idea of temporary monopoly to allow recouping investment. The idea is prima facie good. But patents aren't just legally enforced dibs; the protection is granted in exchange for giving the invention to the public. This is where the patent system doesn't live up to its obligations in practice. There's a bunch of problems that, together, make the whole greater (i.e. worse) than the sum of its parts: - In many industries, but especially in everything involving computers, patent protection is too long - so long that the invention is likely to become useless before the patent expires. Technologies develop in lock step, riff of each other. If you lock down a crucial invention, you're also locking out a whole branch of R&D that may forever remain not explored[0]. - Patents are supposed to contain enough details in them that experts in a relevant field should be able to recreate the invention from the patent text. This is not what happens, we (the public) are being cheated here. The interesting patents are more like invention hashes - they contain just enough data to identify when someone is in the vicinity of invention, but not enough data to reproduce the invention itself. - Patents are routinely awarded for things that do not have an inventive step (i.e. they aren't non-obvious). I'm willing to give some benefit of the doubt here, because ideas tend to look more obvious in hindsight, but I think we've all seen or heard examples of ridiculously obvious patents. - Patents take too long to grant. The process between inventing something and getting it patented can take 2+ years - in that time, the patented invention may be well on its way to becoming obsolete (see point 1). This encourages shotgun patenting. - Patents do not come with an obligation to actually productize an invention. Companies can, and do, patent inventions they have no interest in productizing, with the sole purpose of preventing competitors from exploring some technology or product space. This is as pure slowdown of progress as you can get. I could go on. The point is, the ideas behind a patent system aren't bad - but the implementation decayed to the point of being just another rent seeking system parasitizing society. -- [0] - It's something plainly visible in software, but perhaps software is a special case, due to existence of FLOSS. Maybe, if all software was proprietary, patents would only slow down progress. With FLOSS, nobody is waiting for patents to expire - eventually, someone will find a patent unencumbered alternative, release it for free, and the world ends up adopting that. And then ends up stuck with it, due to sheer momentum. So if that patent locked out the optimal solution to a problem, it's possible we'll never use it, because too much stuff uses the suboptimal, FLOSS version.

sacred_numbers 5y ago

Something can be remarkably simple and still a breakthrough at the same time. Handwashing, for example, is one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time despite its simplicity.

Scene_Cast2 5y ago
On the data side, a simple but effective algorithm is "lightweight coresets". A couple of line of NumPy, but strong guarantees and nice properties.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Lightweight corsets (shapewear using hose-like material) were also a simple, effective breakthrough.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    It made Spanx into a ~$750M company.
sen 5y ago
Yes but telling people who already know how to wash their hands that they should wash them for “more than 1 second and less than 1 hour” isn’t novel, which is effectively what they’re trying to sell here. There’s nothing in this “breakthrough” that isn’t already being done anyway, and the comparison stats are completely made up. 13.8cm resolution in current scanners? Have they even used a 3D scanner made after the millennium turned?

FridayoLeary 5y ago

The fact that the article mentioned 4500% three times, twice in the title alone, kind of warned me to take their news with a pinch of salt.

dxbydt 5y ago

speaking as a humble statistician, If x is your sample, given x = {8, 3, 7, 1, 3, 9} sample mean = (8+3+7+1+3+9)/6 = 5.166, doctors mean = (1+9)/2 = 5, trimmed mean = (8+3+7+3)/4 = 5.25, median aka 50th percentile = (3+7)/2 = 5. ofcourse programmers will have none of this. They'll code up a fancy function called computeMean(x) in java or python or what have you, with proper types & unit tests & suchlike, and declare "the mean is 5.166", and call it a day. No amount of persuasion will convince them that the mean is unknown, because the population's distribution is unknown, so population mean can at-best be hypothesized to some constant c, and then you can run a hypothesis test to see if you can disprove said hypothesis at some alpha level. ofcourse with a sample size of n=6 your power will take a beating and type-2 errors will spike, but who cares about these esoterica when our famed intern has coded up the mean function itself in one afternoon! Snark aside, every summary statistic has widely varying properties. Sample means will asymptotically converge to the population ("true") mean as sample size grows. Sample means are an unbiased estimator of the population mean, so they have the mvue i.e. minimum variance, the variance decreases linearly with sample size. But that doesn't mean one should ditch biased estimators. Choosing a clearly biased estimator such as a trimmed mean instead of the sample mean, which is what they've done here, can definitely result in a huge breakthrough (at the expense of higher variance but that's ok).

uyt 5y ago

Is this better than the commonly taught ransac (random sample consensus) for rejecting outliers? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample_consensus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample_consensus