161–170 of 172 posts
Oh shoot, he does actually explain this exactly. He also mentions 3) speed of the ball. And then, 4) for lines that hit at the same point but with different trajectories and speeds, he takes the "average basketball shot".
The only other thing I am wondering about is what would happen if the ball were flat.
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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…
Is this how sports schedules, NFL, NBA, etc are made?
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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 he…
> you now have a numeric optimization problem as the body of the inner loop of another optimization problem Isn't solving the physics problem a straightforward ODE integration?
And that process needs to be done for all possible incoming ball trajectories that would hit that point of the backboard in order to figure out what backboard angle will maximize the number of shots that go in.
Who uses the back board? This doesn't help at all with "nothin' but net"
No respect for Tim Duncan.
I wonder if Greg Egan reads HN or whether he learnt about this in some other way, but this was his analysis of the same problem from five hours ago: https://twitter.com/gregeganSF/status/1251390966356795392
He credits the video as his inspiration in his 2/2 tweet.
Really impressed with the use of Monte Carlo method. A while back I ran into some resistance trying to advocate simpler statistical methods to solve a problem domain similar to this, while the team in question repeatedly wanted to reach for a machine learning solution. I'd love to know if I was wrong here. In my mind, when an algorithmic or heuristic path to a solution is available, we should attempt it first before…
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?'
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Similar methods exists for all kinds of engineering problems, like architecture (form follows function), roofs, bridges, city planning, or just the economy. The optimal form is always an optimization problem. Just define the constraints. Maybe the most famous example is Gaudi calculating the form of the roofs of the Sagrada Familia, and then Frei Otto for the Munich Olympics. City planning is easier as their is no gr…
Speaking of Disney and architecture and parabolic shapes, apparently when the Disney concert hall was first built, the curved shapes of the building acted as parabolic reflectors which focused on nearby apartment buildings. They had to sand the panels to reduce the reflectivity because they were heating the apartments to as much as 140°F.
We don't have much sound optimization CAD programs, so we worked with light as replacement for sound, and looked at the reflections with raytracers. For the big, expensive concert halls and opera houses.
I love this! I was expecting something more like Mark Rober's movign dartboard [0], which is super cool, but this is even more interesting, because of the way you used software to come up with a general solution in advance. Kudos!
Mark Rober is an interesting character. It feels like he pitches himself as a crazy inventor guy but it seems like he’s more akin to the head of a design laboratory that employs many other talented people. It’s not like he doesn’t acknowledge the other crazy-inventor people he commissions though, and I certainly don’t mean to paint him as a fraud. When he says things like, 1m45s into a video on a steerable bowling ba…