bodangly

Understandable. I do think knowing how to play paper magic leads to a better understanding of the game but being a spike isn’t everyone’s goal.

You can just use Cockatrice for that. Sure it’s not as pretty or as easy, but it supports every card since you pretty much are playing paper magic and it’s not trying to be the referee.

That to me is one of the most interesting aspects. Somehow, these people who were deeply spiritual, also were adepts of science, and while we can’t say any of them got it exactly right, the paths intersected enough that their contributions were in some ways foundational.

Psychology and psychiatry are two other fields that traveled the path of spirituality and occultism before becoming what we now term modern.

Respectfully, Zosimus is one of the earliest Hellenistic writers on alchemy and he speaks of chemistry as a symbol:

“There are two sciences and two wisdoms, that of the Egyptians and that of the Hebrews, which latter is confirmed by divine justice. The science and wisdom of the most excellent dominate the one and the other. Both originate in olden times. Their origin is without a king, autonomous and immaterial; it is not concerned with material and corruptible bodies, it operates, without submitting to strange influences, supported by prayer and divine grace.

The symbol of chemistry is drawn from the creation by its adepts, who cleanse and save the divine soul bound in the elements, and who free the divine spirit from its mixture with the flesh.“

I’d say it goes beyond not being mutually exclusive. They complement each other, sometimes in surprising ways. Sacred geometry, concepts of frequency and vibrational rates, extracting signal from noise, if you are well versed in math and science you’ll find a lot of synchronicities. Fourier analysis dovetails with the concept of unity.

Pythagoras was what we might call an occultist. Newton was an alchemist (which isn’t about lead to gold, it’s about the transmutation of the Self), Jack Parsons was a Thelemite. Ramanujan credited his genius to visions.

Science and math can’t (yet) answer the big questions. There are things it doesn’t even try and touch. In my experience, curious minds are often interested in trying to attain a broader understanding of the universe and our place in it.

It was mostly VIO. The drone had 4 cameras, two front facing, two aimed more at the sides. There were two IMUs on the companion computer (and more on the flight controller of course), as well as a downward facing rangefinder.

Well, for the drones, we did base things off ground truth captured in a mocap lab, and this helped the models significantly. There always will be a jump from simulation to real world, but the smaller you make that jump the quicker you’ll have a functioning vehicle. Without that, you can spend a ton of time (wasted) in simulation when the real world is substantially different. I’m sure a sum of sine waves would get you somewhere, but only so far. To me this is a difficult problem and I think it might be best to do most development in a real world environment.

Yes getting timestamped and synchronized ground truth to build/verify your model will be quite challenging for something like this. For the drones we just took them to a mocap lab, and races are inside so we had the luxury of assuming 0 wind. The only remotely tricky part is handling ground effect from the props.

It was a software competition, whoever developed the best AI was the whole point. And we did NOT give them full course data ahead of time - they had to do this based off VIO only (visual inertial odometry).

Models for drones are actually pretty simple. The races are indoors, so we can assume 0 wind. It’s really basic physics and aerodynamics. We had some sessions in a mocap lab where contestants were able to perform some flights and get some ground truth to tweak their sim -> actual drone dev loop. The simulator itself was based on the DRL simulator, but not the same version on the Steam store.

I did not develop the sim itself but did develop the hardware-in-the-loop portion of it along with things like real-time debugging, and output to the hitl. We had the sim rendering cameras which we output from the workstation to custom HDMI bridges over MIPI that we could treat as real cameras on the NVIDIA Xavier AGX. There was a data channel over Ethernet for IMU data.

I made a custom version of Eclipse that interfaced w GDB for debugging, which also was modified to stay in sync w the sim using PTP, w rewind capability.

As for sailboat modeling, yes it’s more complicated because of the effects of both wind and fluid dynamics. If I were approaching this, I’d probably try and find a physics simulator to start with. Getting ground truth will be difficult, but I imagine you would start w the IMU and GPS data off the boat, but having time synced ground truth for the waves and wind will probably be the hardest part.

It is, yes, but also this was done purely by VIO - courses were not mapped ahead of time. Contestants had very limited time on the actual drone, almost all their work had to be done via HITL simulation. The entire stack was done in maybe 6-8 months, then contestants produced their first code for the drone in a couple more months, and were flying shortly after. It was very clear that given more time, 6 seconds was going to be surpassed very quickly. All of this was live events too - contestants were tweaking code up until cameras rolled and spectators were in the stands.

I am a consultant who developed the companion computer/autopilot and software environment for DRL drones used at the AIRR race sponsored by Lockheed in 2019. UZH was the team to beat and I met Davide and Elia there. They almost pulled it off but sports being what they are had a bit of a heartbreak at the end, and the team from Delft ended up pulling through and winning the $1mm prize. Delft then raced against Gab from DRL and iirc came behind by only 6 seconds.

So glad to see this team from UZH continued pushing the envelope and are now beating human champions. If you saw the team and what they managed in under a year, it was clear they were highly talented and human racers had their work cut out for them to stay ahead.

Ha. I lived in Oxford for a year and the first day I arrived at my flat, there was a giant house spider. To this day it’s the biggest spider I’ve ever seen.

I’m with you. I drive a 24 year old 740iL. It’s a car, it functions well as one. If I want nav or whatever I have a cell phone after all. I even left the sound system original and listen to CDs. Its nice to just go back to basics for a change. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything by my car being dumb as a bag of rocks.