Mark Rober built a robot that solves jigsaw puzzles and pitted it against Tammy McLeod, one of the world’s faster human solvers. The design and build process is fascinating, especially the fine-tuning enabling the robot to “wiggle” each piece into its place.
When we first tried to assemble the puzzle, almost none of the pieces fit together perfectly. This was before we had corrected the errors in the computer vision code as described earlier.
However even after we improved the computer vision code, some small errors remained. Many pieces would fit together perfectly, and then you would see one that was ever so slightly out of place, and that could ruin the alignment for the rest of the puzzle if left unresolved.
To solve this, we took inspiration from humans. If you try to place a puzzle piece with your hands, you’ll find that often you need to wiggle the piece around to get it to snap into place. So we programmed the robot to do the same thing.
Mark Rober puts an octopus he bought from a pet store through an underwater maze to see if it can solve a bunch of puzzles to reach a motherlode of tasty shrimp at the end. This video paired well with a book I recently read, Ray Nayler’s Mountain in the Sea: “Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future.”
As for the name Rober gives the octopus… Sashimi? Really? Bros gotta bro, I guess. 🙄
I don’t know if they specifically had this in mind when making it, but this video from Vox about the importance of hand washing with soap to kill coronavirus is very kid-friendly. From my pals at the excellent The Kid Should See This
Wash your hands for 20 seconds with soap and water. This is the very best way to kill viruses like coronavirus. But why? What’s happening on our hands when we use soap and water? And why do we have to wash with soap for 20 seconds? Why not ten?
The glow-in-the-dark explanation of the 20-second rule was extremely convincing.
Update: Mark Rober did an experiment with a powder that glows under UV and can be transferred from surface to surface (or hand to surface). You can see the germs spreading from person to person and all over that classroom. Yikes.
Mark Rober built a rock skipping robot and by adjusting a bunch of different parameters, he figured out the best way to skip rocks. And no, I completely did not get out a notepad and start jotting down notes while watching this video and there’s no way I’m heading out to one of my favorite rock skipping places tomorrow morning to try out some new techniques. Nope. Not gonna happen. (thx, tom)
This is pretty nerdy and entertaining. After someone stole a package off of his porch, Mark Rober spent months designing and building a fake package to get revenge on the next person stupid enough to try it. He outfitted the box with GPS, motion sensors, four cameras that auto-uploaded to the cloud, a glitter bomb that detonated when the package was opened, and a canister of fart spray that sprayed periodically until the thief threw the package out. Genius.
Update: At least some of the package robberies in this video were staged.
But shortly after the ode to all the packages we’ve lost before swept across the media landscape, viewers on the internet did what they do best: pick it apart.
They noticed some strange coincidences, like how one of the porch bandits seemed to live directly next door to Rober’s friend, Cici, and that the car used in one of the heists, a black Ford Focus with a rosary hanging on the mirror, was parked right in front of her house in Pittsburg, California.
Mark Rober and some friends staked out the carnival games at a local fair for the day in order to find the scams and the ones you can win…if you know how. Armed with info from their observations, Rober hit the fair with a Mets player who could dominate all the throwing games and cleaned them out.
I spent some time at a county fair this past summer and, if you’re with little kids, the carnies will sometimes show you how to win the games that are winnable (like the basket toss). But even after he was shown, my son still couldn’t get that damned wiffle ball in the basket on the two-out-of-three times needed to win a prize.
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