6 ms·
Johns Hopkins Beast
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoI wonder what people who built this with dozens of transistors would make of the fact that we can't really do a lot better with billions of them, a radio link to trillions more and 60 years of work.
- mikeInAlaska 5y agoMaybe Boston Dynamics has indeed done a lot better than The John Hopkins Beast
- beaconstudios 5y agoI'd say the Internet is a good example of a cybernetic model that is a step up in scale from this. That's pretty impressive! We actually do a lot of things much better than this lil guy, that just don't take the form of robots the way the futurists and scifi authors of the 60s predicted. I can order food online to be delivered to me on a device the size of my hand, that also connects me to most of the earth's population, and gives me a direct line to all of humanity's knowledge, art, and perspectives. We really do live in the future, it just doesn't look like the Jetsons!
- Koshkin 5y agoWell, most of those billions of transistors are memory rather than logic circuits. (And no, 640K is no longer enough for everybody, unfortunately.)
- a_t48 5y agoAre you sure? My roomba can self navigate the house, and go back to a charging station as needed - including if the room geometry changes around it or if it's dropped in an unknown area.
- pie420 5y agoThey would chuckle when they realized how instead of seeking to replace $8/hr labor to do simple tasks with fancy robots, we instead decided to focus on telecommunications and mobile computing, and now anyone can buy a smartphone for $800 that has a 120 fps HD+ screen (inconceivable to someone in the 60's) that can download 100mbps (inconceivable) almost anywhere in the world (inconceivable), record 4k/60FPS HDR video(inconceivable), store 1TB data (inconceivable) buy anything in the world and have it delivered tomorrow (inconceivable). We've built far more interesting and useful things. Furthermore, It's not that we can't, we just don't want to. We like interacting with the world around us. Most people enjoy cooking, cleaning our living spaces, etc. As it ties us to the world. If we outsourced this to robots, we would maybe save some time, but then have to deal with robot repairs and troubleshooting. Which would you rather do: Make dinner on a lovely Le Creuset pan or troubleshoot your Super Cook-a-tron 3000 because it broke down again?
- Adraghast 5y agoSeems like you’re discounting the reliability of a hypothetical Super Cook-a-tron 3000 in furtherance of a particular native. Professional chefs and housekeepers exist.
- sidpatil 5y ago> Furthermore, It's not that we can't, we just don't want to. We like interacting with the world around us. Most people enjoy cooking, cleaning our living spaces, etc. I'm not sure. From what I've seen, cooking and cleaning are usually considered to be inconvenient. I'd wager that most people do these things themselves because the alternatives are expensive in the long run, in more than one way.
- eternityforest 5y agoWe have amazing industrial robotics now. We also have bots that can navigate real world organic spaces, they're just expensive and nobody knows what to do with them in any consumer appplicationn.
- paxys 5y agoI think they would marvel at the scale of industrial automation, assembly lines in factories, robots packing and moving boxes in Amazon warehouses, Roombas in people's homes, autonomous cars on the roads and drones in the sky, all the stuff Boston Dynamics comes up with.
- yeetsfromhellL2 5y agothis thing sounds smart as, if not smarter than, a roomba.
- ericbarrett 5y agoWe're doing OK though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw
- sgt101 5y agoDunno - did you see that Waymo is operating autonomously in SF now? I think that the revelation of the complexity of the real world is the most interesting part of the story.
- natmaka 5y agoDuring the 1940's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter#Robots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter#Robots
- Animats 5y agoThe Hopkins Beast was so far ahead of its time.
- throwaway5752 5y agoVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMpEeag7kkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMpEeag7kkM ("APL Flashback: 1965 - The "Hopkins Beast" Mobile Automaton ", taken from the 2nd external link in the Wikipedia article, of the Mod II) also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szGFt28BiBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szGFt28BiBY ("APL Flashback: 1964 - "Ferdinand" the Mobile Automaton", a similar device)
- agumonkey 5y agoWow, sorry for diverting the topic a tiny bit but there's a strong star wars IV reminiscence in these vids. I wonder how common this robots were in the minds of people of the 60s/70s.
- Multicomp 5y agoAmazing how my generic Roomba does all those same behaviors (navigate a room with obstacles, find its own charger) shown in that first video, but it took another 60 years for such a thing to be a cheap consumer product. Wonder how long it will take to find a Roomba that can be scheduled to run more than once every 24 hours? /J
- zitterbewegung 5y agoIt is much cheaper to make a prototype than making something at scale (although publishing the circuit diagrams and so forth might have been interesting. The biggest problem in this would be having a battery that would power a Roomba to do vacuuming without looking for an outlet every five minutes. Roombas also have edge detection so it doesn't fall down the stairs. But, all of the mother of all demo's technology took forty years to implement also.
- joshjdr 5y ago> Roombas also have edge detection so it doesn't fall down the stairs. From article, “It could also ultrasonically recognize the stairway and doorways to take appropriate action.”
- throwoutway 5y agoMy eyes popped when I learned it functioned with just some basic transistors and could find outlets and recharge itself. Amazing! Is there a surviving photograph?
- zinekeller 5y agoA sibling comment uncovered not just a photo but a whole video demo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30861972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30861972
- aplsoftwaredev 5y agoHi all, I work at JHU apl in the r&d department and wanted to say that we're hiring right now! Pay isn't FAANG level but you get to do some really interesting work and you have a good bit of freedom in choosing what projects you get to work on. If you're a curious person that likes to constantly keep learning to tackle new challenges, it's a great place to work. That being said, our hiring process is ancient and takes a good bit of time to go through and you'll probably need to be able to get a clearance of some sort.
- austinprete 5y agoProbably implied, but I’m assuming this requires relocating to Baltimore?
- aplsoftwaredev 5y agoIt's located between Baltimore and DC in Laurel Maryland. I commute from central baltimore and the drive is around 40 minutes. It's looking like some amount of in office time will be required (2-3 days a week) although some people have been working remotely since before the pandemic. If you're working on classified stuff you'll also need to be on campus.
- alexk307 5y ago> probably need to be able to get a clearance of some sort. Why is this the case? Is everything being worked on government funded? I would probably apply otherwise.
- throwaway787544 5y agoThey make bombs, crazy spy stuff, crack crypto. Def needs clearance.
- jcurbo 5y agoYes; APL is a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) and while we sometimes do work with industry, our whole purpose is to support the US Government. That doesn't necessarily mean you need a clearance, but much of our work is national security related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Affiliated_Research_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Affiliated_Research...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Etheryte 5y agoA curious insight into the visions of future at the time. The robot [0] has curious resemblance to Daleks [1] of Doctor Who fame, with Daleks making their first on-screen appearance only a year or two after the initial release of this robot. Life imitates art imitates life. [0] http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1962-5-hopkins-beast-autonomous-robot-mod-ii-sonarvision-jhu-apl-american/ http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1962-5-hopkins-be... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek
- paulpauper 5y agoearly roomba
- yeetsfromhellL2 5y agothis thing reminds me of the [something] paradox. humans maximize what they can use, not what they're able to do with it, unless forced to. modern day roombas have much more computing power than most (any?) computers did at the the time the Beast was created, but it performs essentially the same function. you could make the argument that the humans making the roomba spent less time/energy/money developing it with modern computing tech and high level languages than researchers did developing the Beast, but the apparent requirement of an increase of computing power by many orders of magnitude for a reduction of effort by one or two orders of magnitude is completely insane.
- pyinstallwoes 5y agoYes, see: software bloat. Hardware constraints force good engineering. The fact is that ever growing hardware capabilities has enabled poor engineering practices to succeed. The technical debt is already being exposed in infosec / related supply chain issues.
- anonu 5y ago> 40 kilocyles First time I hear that term. It hurts to hear it...
- servytor 5y agoI see this as an early example of BEAM robotics[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics
- ignutispuke10 5y ago