In anticipation of the New Year ...

Enjoy this, from Boston Dynamics: **LINK**

https://youtu.be/fn3KWM1kuAw

My how things have progressed in the last few decades

MichaelG.

Like that Shall start building one right away

Happy New Year

John

Very impressive, especially when you think they can program the routines, but the droids have to balance and plan the moves in real time.

But I can't help thinking of Terminator...

Neil

If I'm honest, I struggled a bit with the balancing, especially with the resulting inertia. Promotional CGI maybe?

Thats briiliant. What will AI think in a thousand years when it looks back at this?

Slightly different sort of action, but for the drone fliers amongst you;

Edinburgh's Hogmanay show (Part 1 of 3)

https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/edinburghs-hogmanay-show-what-time-19534805

I've not found it on Youtube yet

Happy New Year folks

When linking videos websites or documents will people plase add a line explaining what the subject is. It is only good maners and only takes a few seconds. People may have seen it before, have religious or other objections to the content, all sorts of reasons for not wanting to waste their time on it.

Peak has the right idea at lesat giving a hint of the content.

Edited By Bazyle on 30/12/2020 20:13:15

Sorry, Bazyle ... I presumed that the reference to Boston Dynamics would suffice for most of those with an interest in Engineering:

Sincerely

”People”

.

P.S. ___ for the avoidance of doubt [or your personal inconvenience] the hyperlinked words, above, will take you here: https://www.bostondynamics.com

Bit late for bah humbug !

Well I've earned my living in engineering for nearly 50 years and it meant nothing to me

.

I am genuinely astonished, Duncan ... I can say no more

MichaelG.

Thanks for the link Michael. It's made my ( New ) Year!

Now, I wonder if the offer dancing lessons?

Pero

I think I need one of those guys to do all the 'domestic stuff' that shmbo keeps finding to scupper my 'playing' (her words) in my workshop !!

Edited By Steve Neighbour on 01/01/2021 09:44:41

Have a look at this...

**LINK**

CUBLI from ETH Zurich. They also have videos of drones balancing long poles, throwing them in the air, and catching them.

While this is very impressive, you can see it was done over many takes with presumably outtakes like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
happening in between!

Plus, the battery life must be really short. So, at the moment, they can only conquer those of us who live within extension cable reach of Boston Dynamics!

deleted V8 

Edited By V8Eng on 02/01/2021 23:22:59

This is Atlas : **LINK**

https://www.bostondynamics.com/atlas

MichaelG.

Michael

If I could do that leads or batteries or what I would be a very happy man !! Thanks for sharing and it really shows the progress of technology to date. I remember a James Bod film where there was a tracking system that displayed the target on a visual display system and I thought "Yeah really" yet a few years later along came GPS and map tracking. I really wonder what the future holds in the development of technology especially with the introduction of Ai etc,

Thanks and stay safe.

Martin

Ah well, that is the big debate. Some self-appointed AI gurus are predicting the "AI Singularity" where AI becomes more intelligent than humans and runs away with itself to take over the world to happen in 2045.

But many cognitive scientists, philosophers and other students of the mind say that there is so much more to the human mind than merely calculating that AI will never even approach its abilities.

As a daily user of AI in the form of Autocorrect on my phone, I'm in the latter camp.

When people talk about AI they are normally thinking of it as operating in real time where the limiting factor is the speed of the underlying hardware.

For example, most phones etc. now have speech recognition. The underlying computational models for this such as hidden Markov modelling have been around over thirty years (I was referencing declassified DARPA papers on this from the late eighties when studying for my computing degree). At the time even Intel 486 processors or RISC based workstations did not have the speed to translate continuous speech in real time.

Although AI has undoubtedly moved on since my degree days, its progress cannot match the progress made in hardware. The results of two experiments announced last month illustrate beautifully the difference fast hardware can make.

1. A laser based quantum computer has completed a calculation in 4 minutes. Doesn't sound much until you compare it to the time a traditional computer would have taken of 2.56 billion years (that's roughly half the age of the planet Earth.)

Link to article explaining the paper Quantum device performs 2.6 billion years of computation in 4 minutes

Link to original paper Quantum computational advantage using photons

2. An experiment has almost instantaneously transferred data over 44km using off the shelf hardware coupled with teleportation (and you thought Star Trek was just SciFi!).

Link to article explaining the paper long-distance 'quantum teleportation' for the first time

Link to the original paper Teleportation Systems Toward a Quantum Internet