Unlike most online newspapers, my Google feed provides a good daily dose of interesting articles. One of them was about some clever folks who made a robot to throw basketballs in the hoop. You might ask “Why?”, being me, I was curious how “hard could it be?”
Check out their awesome robot: EXTERNAL LINK: Fox News – AI Basketball Robot
If you aren’t impressed by it, maybe try making one. Most things seem easy until you try…
Meet “Abcde” (pronounced ‘Ab-si-dee’) the stick-person, their primary caregiver liked the idea of them getting “stick” for the name. You don’t think that’s a name? Well, 400+ American girls have been called it, and one poor 5-year-old got laughed at checking into a flight. Sorry no link, you’ll have to Google it. Abcde is already frowning, they think people shouldn’t be mean.
Abcde thought it might be fun throwing basketballs, and reached out to me. Their LinkedIn profile looked impressive, like “Rachel from Accounts” (Google it). #sarcasm. I had my suspicions. Anyway, in The Wizard of Oz, Scarecrow got a brain, I thought I would see what I could do.
After hours of practice, Abcde has excelled. Be thankful they are constrained to a virtual world.
Abcde likes to change their colour so as not to offend anyone. Is it a boy or girl, you’re wondering. Neither, sticks don’t have a gender. Anyway, there are now far too many genders to choose from for a limited IQ stick-person.
Don’t pick up Abcde, and please don’t ask Abcde how many lines of code they are, it offends. We live in a “right to be offended” era in case you were asleep for the last 10 years.
I bet there is some smart person out there rolling their eye, how hard can it be? Actually, the equation to determine the force for any given distance and angle isn’t quite so easy to solve once you introduce air resistance. Prove me wrong.
All the source code is in the usual place, on GitHub.
