Next level: a camera and a couple of motors to see the speed/location of the ball and adjust the backboard accordingly.
Really liked his static approach vs. Mark Rober's robotic dartboard.
Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
71–80 of 172 posts
Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you fix the position of the 'thrower' and just throw them at ridiculous speeds so gravity doesn't matter you'd end up with a hyperbolic backboard. So annoyingly for an 'optimal' solution you'd need to specify where people can throw from and how fast. Frankly you might as well just use a hyperbola with one foci on the hoop and the other on the middle of the court, or maybe a point slightly higher than the court its…
Wouldn't you rather want an ellipsoid with the thrower at one focus and the hoop at the other?
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Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#73Nope, 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?
"brute-force" is what you call monte carlo if you don't know what monte carlo is
Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#74Did other people also wonder what a French cleat might be? It is a molding with a 30–45 degree slope used to hang cabinets or other objects. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_cleat
We used them a lot when hanging up art work.
Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Physics engine like Bullet or ODE to calculate the simulated trajectories Probably not, the trajectories are simple parabolic and you can assume perfect elastic collision. Easy enough to implement, compared to interfacing with a physics engine. In fact, it sounded like he approximated the ball by a point and ignored the radius.
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 enough inverse kinematics solver to handle this kind of problem?
Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#76Really 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…
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Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#77To say I’m impressed by the video and more specifically the algorithm would be the understatement of the century. This is amazing. Please let me buy one :)
Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#78Really 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?'
Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#79Does this only work if you’re exactly aligned in front of the hoop? (eg Free-Throw Line)
Re: Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]
#80Does this only work if you’re exactly aligned in front of the hoop? (eg Free-Throw Line)
No it's optimized to work from anywhere in the court, although he didn't say what distribution he used.