Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

- Like all of these things, your training data matters and the internet is awash with videos of people climbing badly. A lot of people specifically post "I can't climb this, what am I doing wrong?" videos. World cup climbers are, by the nature of the competition, extremely talented and technically proficient climbers. Even when they fail, they fail in smart interesting ways.

- There's lots of high quality video footage out there. Heck, the problems are even set with visual clarity in mind which would help when parsing that footage. There's potentially enough video to train instances on individual climbers. You could run side by sides like "How would Tamoa climb this and how would Janja climb this?".

- World cup problems are stylistically distinct. They involve lots of moves "typical" climbers will never ever encounter. Many climbers will look at a typical gym problem and think "I have an idea of how to climb this" but will look at a world cup problem and just think "????????". An app that told you how a problem like that should be climbed might be useful.

There are drawbacks too.

- World cup climbers are outliers, whose physical ability (strength, flexibility, etc.) give them access to kinds of movement that other climbers just don't have. No amount of "knowing the sequence" will get me up a climb that requires a full bat hang (look it up) because I just don't have the ankle strength to do the movement.

- World cup "style" is only commonly used at high level comps and in very large commercial gyms. It's probably not extremely relevant to a typical climbing session.

- World cup problems are very hard. Mostly v10 and up? It would be hilarious to watch a model trained on genetic monsters crushing the world's hardest boulder problems try to tell a doughy office worker (me) how to climb v2.

The "Boss" from Pusher is arguably the most famous climbing hold ever made. For a decade or more, every gym had one, but they were all unique. Lots of them had micro chips that became critical to usage of the hold. Some had decent texture and some were glassy smooth from years and years and years of use. A lot of the accidental variation in new holds has gone away as the industry has standardized around a handful of industrial fabricators like Aragon, but even over the course of a single indoor boulder problem's life, the accumulation of chalk, sweat, and shoe rubber can have a significant impact on how a hold climbs.

I guess the real question is, do these changes just make routes harder or do they make them fundamentally different? Do they actually change the set of moves that constitutes the easiest way to the top? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. But it's something interesting to think about.

It's an interesting project and it could be fun to watch, but it's completely useless.