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Considering it scans all the rocks, you'd think it would be able to fit the rocks together better. I don't expect a Incan wall, but I think it would be able to
by soperj 3y ago
Considering it scans all the rocks, you'd think it would be able to fit the rocks together better. I don't expect a Incan wall, but I think it would be able to construct a tighter fitting wall if it were programmed to care.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoIt could perhaps if it had all rocks available up front to scan and plan the entire wall with. But it retrieves one rock at a time and can only place on the top row somewhere. Given the geometries are random I wouldn’t expect it to reliably have tight fits given how it’s sampling and placing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ano-ther 3y agoIt scans 20-30 (a truckload) before building a section of the wall with them.
- mlhpdx 3y agoExactly as I do as a human when I build such walls (several of them in my life). It’s a very difficult spatial problem to fit the stones into a pretty, stable structure. No doubt something large memories and detailed spatial search on a computer could help with. That doesn’t seem to have happened in this example, though. That wall is horrendously ugly.
- highstep 3y agoNot only ugly, but unstable and sketchy. I wouldn't go near that wall.
- foota 3y agoI'm getting some light towers of hanoi vibes
- ur-whale 3y agoIn other words, it's using a greedy algorithm
- soperj 3y agoEven then, if you make one long row, you have hundreds of available spots to place it, with at least 6 sides to decide on which orientation to place the stone. If there are no good spots currently, it could place the stone down next to the pile and go collect another stone until a better spot materialized.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoNo, I was wrong. It has a collection of 30 or so rocks per section and optimizes their placement in the entire section. I’ll still posit the randomness of the geometry requires more rocks than that to find a smooth fitting, and I imagine human wall makers select rocks up front with similar geometries before even beginning out of thousands of rocks then optimizes their placement during construction in a similar but less preside way than the machine. If you watch the video closer than I did you will see it plans each stone for optimal stability and placement.
- defrost 3y agoAn Incan wall is much "easier" (airqoted qualifier). There's much effort required to square up stone and shape faces, a lot of drilling, wedges, and precision chisel finishing. However, once it comes to the stacking it's been reduced to a bricklaying exercise (already solved for robots and posted to HN). Traditional drywall evolved from field clearing, stacking rocks to get them out of the way and to reduce wind across exposed otherwise rocky potential fields. Stacking and balancing "as they come" or with relative minimal look ahead | reshuffle queuing is a tougher proposition; this is impressive work.
- soperj 3y agoI'm not saying that it's not impressive. I'm just saying that I feel like considering that it doesn't have the human limitations of it being hard to remember every facet of the rocks, that it could do better job still!
- Qwertious 3y agoSome Incan walls are regular bricks, but others are just slightly-dressed boulders used for drywall polygonal masonry. They're an interesting compromise - some dressing for flexibility, but not so much that you have to throw half the boulder away.