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Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

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Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#111

Post by mlyle »

wtallis wrote: post #75
Gravyness wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While interfacing a physics engine is hard, I feel like it would be hard to forget to add the radius in a physics simulation, making mistakes like this rather difficult. So yeah, you can reinvent the wheel but using specialized tools gets the job done too, usually with less painful mistakes, but that's the price to pay for the lack of learning you get with the tool.

Would a physics engine actually make it any easier to solve this inverse problem? Simulating where the ball ends up relative to the hoop after bouncing off the board is the kind of forward problem that I tend to think of physics engines as designed for, but the problem here is to (repeatedly) determine what angle of board would yield the desired post-bounce trajectory. Does something like Bullet have a flexible enoug…

You could definitely improve / take advantage of rim interactions, for instance, and more easily not have the problem he has with the lower corners.

Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#112

Post by TeMPOraL »

remarkEon wrote: post #109
ericvolp12 wrote: post #93

This was really well explained and interesting. Funnily enough I'm pretty sure this is a really similar method to urinal design, so if this whole basketball thing doesn't work out for ya, you could always work for American Standard...

Upvoted this because I'm tired of peeing on urinals in bars and restaurants that have flat walls, and every time I do I think "gosh don't these guys have any engineers on their payroll?".

It's the same thinking as with software UI/UX. Doing things right is so last century, you have to stand out somehow.

Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#113

Post by kidintech »

Very out of left field, but how does one start doing these kind of things?

My background is in CS and math, and I could have come up with and built everything up to exporting the mesh into triangles, but would have needed months of google searching and trial and error to do the actual "machining" part of things.

And then even if I went through the painful process of learning it on the job for this task, the learned skills would probably not transfer very well into the next adventure. Additionally, I imagine the machine used in the video is fairly expensive and not worth purchasing for one experiment.

I'm asking this because I find these kind of builds fascinating, but I'm always humbled about my skills when I think about the transition from digital to material.

Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#114

Post by chrisco255 »

kidintech wrote: post #113

Very out of left field, but how does one start doing these kind of things? My background is in CS and math, and I could have come up with and built everything up to exporting the mesh into triangles, but would have needed months of google searching and trial and error to do the actual "machining" part of things. And then even if I went through the painful process of learning it on the job for this task, the learned s…

YouTube videos are one of the best ways to learn mechanical/material skills. Just start. You'll suck at first. Keep at it and eventually you'll suck a little less. One day you'll be mediocre. And if you keep at it you'll be skilled.

Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#116

Post by cmonnow »

remarkEon wrote: post #107

Aside from the Apollo 13 in Real Time website, this is the coolest thing I've seen on the internet in the last 3 months. Sent this to my brother, which of course precipitated a huge sibling argument about which player would've benefited more from this assuming we're talking about players that tend to shoot jump shots. I'll let you guys know who wins. Edit: We mostly disagree on the type of shot that certain players m…

OMG just found out about this - https://apolloinrealtime.org/

Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#117

Post by OscarCunningham »

numuliank wrote: post #11

Nope, expected something interesting, but this is based on a boring brute-force simulation. He did hint at using a parabolic shape, like in satellite dishes. Why not use some actual calculus and differential equations to figure out the optimal parabolic-like shape here?

There won't be a closed form answer because the optimal solution depends on the distribution of the angles and velocities of the shots coming toward the backboard, which will be a complicated real-life distribution.

Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#118

Post by wtallis »

mlyle wrote: post #111
wtallis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a physics engine actually make it any easier to solve this inverse problem? Simulating where the ball ends up relative to the hoop after bouncing off the board is the kind of forward problem that I tend to think of physics engines as designed for, but the problem here is to (repeatedly) determine what angle of board would yield the desired post-bounce trajectory. Does something like Bullet have a flexible enoug…

You could definitely improve / take advantage of rim interactions, for instance, and more easily not have the problem he has with the lower corners.

There are obvious ways that the physics engine might be able to capture more effects than a simple analytic solution of parabolic trajectories. But if it only lets you run the simulation forward to get a trajectory from initial conditions, then you now have a numeric optimization problem as the body of the inner loop of another optimization problem.

If the physics engine can't efficiently solve the inverse problem here, it is probably only well-suited for simulating a final solution for validation, not iterating over the rather large space of possible shot trajectories times possible backboard angles at the point of impact.

Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#119

Post by 0-_-0 »

avilay wrote: post #14

That was a pretty cool video! I loved how he used 3D Monte-Carlo and side-stepped all the complicated math. I wonder if he was using a Physics engine like Bullet or ODE to calculate the simulated trajectories. Also, a good intermediate step might've been to build the backboard in something like Unity and shoot some hoops to catch the radius error before actually machining it out.

> complicated math

Is it though? Isn't the final shape just a paraboloid, like a parabolic antenna with the hoop in the focal point?

Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

#120

Post by kilotaras »

IgorPartola wrote: post #84
Taek wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common trap in tech is to reach for the fanciest tool instead of the simplest. The best engineering often comes from mastery of the simple tools, and the most beautiful engineering is the one that makes you say 'that's so obvious, why didn't anyone ever come up with that before?'

One of my favorite software solutions that I came up with was “human learning” powered. A few years ago I was working as the engineering manager at a small company. I had 8 other people who I was in charge of and we had moved to a new office in the middle of this. Our team took up two rooms in the office and I had to figure out who would be sitting where. I had some preconceived notions of who would be productive tog…

There's a great talk from StrangeLoop[0] where a presenter uses Alloy modelling in exactly the same manner:

- generate a couple examples

- see something wrong

- add a rule

- repeat

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvNRlE4E9QQ

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