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AI for American-produced cement and concrete

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Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#31

Post by mathisfun123 »

woah wrote: post #27
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #9

> As a result, producers need a way to rapidly explore and validate new formulations without spending months in the lab. How do you bypass the normal process of pouring test articles and testing them months and years after cure? This is fundamentally a research activity that needs to conduct verifiable science. Not something you can guess at with an LLM.

Somebody needs to coin a new term for the scattershot zero-thought AI griping that is pervasive in online comments these days. Meatslop? Obviously it's going to be more productive for a manufacturer to do a years-long curing test on 100 likely candidates instead of 100 random mixes. They obviously already screen candidates through traditional methods, but if this AI technique improves accuracy, all the better.

hn discourse is not nearly as high-quality as people would like to believe.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#32

Post by harimau777 »

Animats wrote: post #28

Hand-held devices for testing concrete properties would be more useful. Most concrete problems come from a bad mix - too much water, not enough cement, etc. Concrete testing usually involves cutting a core out of the poured slab and sending it to a lab. Something where you stick a probe in the mix and can reject it before pouring would help. Here are some on-site concrete testers.[1] They're heavy and a pain to use.…

I'm surprised the ratios for a given situation isn't standardized by now. Is it just people cutting corners?

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#33

Post by mathisfun123 »

dcre wrote: post #30
woah wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody needs to coin a new term for the scattershot zero-thought AI griping that is pervasive in online comments these days. Meatslop? Obviously it's going to be more productive for a manufacturer to do a years-long curing test on 100 likely candidates instead of 100 random mixes. They obviously already screen candidates through traditional methods, but if this AI technique improves accuracy, all the better.

I call it pseudo-critique — active stupidity in the name of critical thinking — but that’s too general.

https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#34

Post by rootusrootus »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #31
woah wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody needs to coin a new term for the scattershot zero-thought AI griping that is pervasive in online comments these days. Meatslop? Obviously it's going to be more productive for a manufacturer to do a years-long curing test on 100 likely candidates instead of 100 random mixes. They obviously already screen candidates through traditional methods, but if this AI technique improves accuracy, all the better.

hn discourse is not nearly as high-quality as people would like to believe.

It’s very bimodal.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#35

Post by sebastianeament »

AngryData wrote: post #10

Jesus I hope they do proper testing for these experimental mixes and don't trust whatever random garbage AI decides you should mix in. This is exactly the kind of thing AI is absolutely terrible at because it has no logical skills or direct experience or ability to test it. If your AI coded stuff goes belly up, you get to try again. If your multi million dollar cement foundation turns out to be sub-par, thats multi m…

We use Gaussian processes trained on vetted test data from academic and industry partners. We use these predictions to recommend mixes for onsite testing to accelerate finding mixtures with optimal strength-speed-sustainability trade-offs. None of the data and predictions go untested. The blog post goes into this in more detail.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#36

Post by Aurornis »

harimau777 wrote: post #32
Animats wrote: post #28

Hand-held devices for testing concrete properties would be more useful. Most concrete problems come from a bad mix - too much water, not enough cement, etc. Concrete testing usually involves cutting a core out of the poured slab and sending it to a lab. Something where you stick a probe in the mix and can reject it before pouring would help. Here are some on-site concrete testers.[1] They're heavy and a pain to use.…

I'm surprised the ratios for a given situation isn't standardized by now. Is it just people cutting corners?

Working with multiple tons of material that dries out as you move it around is hard. There are a lot of steps between the concrete being mixed and when it finally reaches the pour.

Cutting out a piece of a slab and sending it to a lab is for post-pour validation in serious construction. There are pre-pour tests that are much simpler depending on the seriousness of what you’re building.

The slump test is rather simple, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_slump_test

It’s basically a cone with handles and a procedure that’s easy to learn.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#37

Post by mathisfun123 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #34
mathisfun123 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hn discourse is not nearly as high-quality as people would like to believe.

It’s very bimodal.

just like everywhere else? reddit has fairly good wheat among the chaff just the same?

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#38

Post by mrbonner »

AngryData wrote: post #10

Jesus I hope they do proper testing for these experimental mixes and don't trust whatever random garbage AI decides you should mix in. This is exactly the kind of thing AI is absolutely terrible at because it has no logical skills or direct experience or ability to test it. If your AI coded stuff goes belly up, you get to try again. If your multi million dollar cement foundation turns out to be sub-par, thats multi m…

Can you at least read the article before criticizing them? They explicitly call out that they use Bayesian Optimization (Gaussian process) thing for this. It is "AI" but not "LLM" like you think it is.

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#39

Post by sebastianeament »

Mr_P wrote: post #7

I had to double check that this wasn't an April Fools joke. The GitHub project has commits from 2 weeks ago, so it's not. Looking more closely though, this looks a lot like the Google "AI Cookie" from 2017, which also used Bayesian Optimization: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/ma...

Google's "Smart Cookie" indeed also used techniques from Bayesian Optimization. For some technical detail, see their write-up here: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Our work on concrete here differs in that the problem is both 1) an inherently time-varying, and 2) multi-objective. See our write-up here for details: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.18288

Re: AI for American-produced cement and concrete

#40

Post by m4rkuskk »

harimau777 wrote: post #32
Animats wrote: post #28

Hand-held devices for testing concrete properties would be more useful. Most concrete problems come from a bad mix - too much water, not enough cement, etc. Concrete testing usually involves cutting a core out of the poured slab and sending it to a lab. Something where you stick a probe in the mix and can reject it before pouring would help. Here are some on-site concrete testers.[1] They're heavy and a pain to use.…

I'm surprised the ratios for a given situation isn't standardized by now. Is it just people cutting corners?

They are standardized for a given mix. A mix design that is based on a trial badge is submitted to the SEOR prior to pouring anything. The mix design shows the ratios ingredients (cementitious materials, find and coarse aggregates, water, air, admixtures). But Concrete is still a non-homogeneous material with lots of variations. Take for instance aggregates, if it rained the last two weeks, the moisture content will be higher but it may only be a layer on that pile. Same goes for gradation (particle size of the rock). Sometimes you get a batch with smaller rock. There are a 100 things that can go wrong to get bad mud.

But yeah, there are concrete plants that cut corners and try to save on cement (the most expensive part of the mix), which depending on the project may bite them in the ass when they have to pay to fixing it.

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