Variations Too -- run up

And so, a couple months ago I came down with a (tiny) fit of organizing fever and cleared up a small portion of a pathway in (one of) my massively parallel parts storage areas. I found some crappy motors I had gotten (cheap) from a surplus place that I had attempted to make into a 2-d swinging robot arm, to make even some small progress on the big proposal.

They didn't work worth a damn:

picture of crappy motors

But, out of curiosity, I found a sketch of my intentions in an old notebook from 2014 (where you can clearly see why I do not practice drawing and painting as a profession):

 picture of robot arm crappy drawing

I got to thinking that maybe I could re-start the whole project by actually spending money to get motors and components that might work.  (Over this course I realized that I could spend $200 on oysters and gin and have a fine time with friends for an evening, or I could spend -- well, more, but in the ballpark -- on motors and gears, and get in a week or two of mostly enjoyable fiddling around before discovering that things weren't going to work; so, bang for buck over hours this is a way more economically efficient alternative.)

There ensued a couple weeks of web surfing trying to figure out what "hobby servo" motors to get, even though I already have about 50 random ones.

There are a number of vendors.

Each has around 100 choices.

The choices are mostly incommensurate.

Comparing across the sources, and sometimes within a single source, is problematic. Plus there are around 10 different output shaft "spline" configurations, that are often not even specified in the literature. I finally realized that I had to stick to one source (servocity.com, the high price spread, but has reasonably complete spec sheets). And this lead me to realize that I had only two choices of splines because they were the only two that had available matching gears to be attached. So I got an assortment of the highest power motors with the same matching splines, and a buncha gears:

servo boxes

Then, waiting on UPS Ground cheap(er) shipping, I thought I would just go ahead and design the mounting brackets and all. Thus I found that not even the motor manufacturer has mechanical drawings of their products (I did find one 3d rendering of one that I could rotate around in virtual space, which was kinda fun). Of course, one of the main things one wants to know when designing mounting plates for geared mechanisms is: How far is the output shaft from the mounting holes?

So. After the motors arrived I managed to measure and estimate the necessary and the gears seem to mesh OK. Just in case, here is my DXF drawing of the Hitek HS-225, HS-645, HS-755, and HS-805 motor mounts from which you may be able to extract relevant measurements. These are laid out to mesh two 32 pitch gears:

• 40 Tooth 1.250" Pitch diameter C1 Spline mount on the motor
• 20 Tooth 0.625" Pitch diameter plain bore on the mating arm

 http://www.etantdonnes.com/Media/cholla/servoGears.DXF 

image of DXF for scale

Next up... design arms....

Variations More

Anyway. A few years ago the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) re-started an Art and Technology program that had slipped under the waves in the early 70's. So I hacked and hewed a proposal to make a set of robot arms that Learned to Dance.  I called the work Variations For as a pun on John Cage's, Variations IV, the canonical recording of which was made in LA in the mid-60's

Variations For Proposal

tldr; The arms solved the problem of knowing their own orientation and could just as well use the same sort of algorithms as my RoboCars to create a sequence of motions -- Teach Themselves to Dance -- AND could be influenced by viewer input via video. Plus the LACMA program was set up to put artists together with technological support -- which I could, certainly, use. That and money to pay for stuff...

Due to my obvious lack of Charm, Cachet, Credential, and Competence, they wisely declined my proposal. It was however a high point of my applying for things because I got BOTH an acknowledgement of receipt AND a politely encouraging rejection letter.

Funnily(?) enough. A couple years ago I ran across another artist who had subsequently applied for the same program with a proposal (in my loose interpretation) to make video game characters able to determine their own next moves rather than always having pre-programmed responses. Since he clearly was in possession of all the above 'C' qualities his project was accepted, and I noticed a recent announcement of some show of something in progress, up on which I did not follow.

N Variations on a Theme

Back in pre-history I had a job doing robotics research which lead me to make some small autonomous vehicles that, thanks to my friend Tori's support in showing something at her Dactyl space in Soho, developed a sequence of motions for themselves -- taught themselves a dance step.

Here's the whole presentation from a time when the internet sort of worked for video, which it now does in a completely differently-abled way (I think the video files are still there but they are in Quicktime which seems to have been disappeared):

ROBOCAR Collective

tldr; Each robot had a set of motions it could do -- forward, backward, and turns. It would pick a partner and each would select a motion and then adjudicate who's movement to execute.  This would make that motion more likely to be selected, by both partners, in future situations. Then they would pick a new partner and repeat the exercise until, eventually, all five of the vehicles would be performing the same sequence.  This was programmed using a Stochastic Finite State Automata, which is a fine state of affairs if you are not jargon enabled.

Unfortunately, I (they) had no way of knowing where each vehicle was and which way it was facing. So the net result still looked a bit of a jumble. But. Here is the U-Tub money shot from when "they" all happened to synchronize (at https://youtu.be/slfprpe848s):

I tried to fix the position insensitivity a couple times but eventually lost interest due to many of my pre-existing conditions.

Funny(?) aside. Now, ten or so years later, it appears that Urs Fischer has (hired folks to) solve this problem using a set of office chairs, as displayed at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea:

Gagosian -- Fischer -- Chairs

More Spam

Got this, nearly, irresistible offer yesterday in my inbox -- which these days  rarely gets anything but unsolicited crap and online sales receipts....

Good morn͒in̹g my āss pun͈isȟeͪr...
arֱe yo̍u ready to f#ck? i'm sͤo wet right noٍw.
lͫetِ's chat a͡nd h̭00֪kup
My nic̽k̴name is Guadٟalupeָ1981

What a great name for a death metal band, eh? All those special letters are html escape sequences that I had no idea one could use...maybe worth looking into getting a trademark?.

my āss pun͈isȟeͪr

Local Color XX++

Long time, sorry, I've been uninspired by life the universe and everything...

Anyway.

Two back-to-back only-in-NM news items have forced me out of forced retirement:

Man Beats “Zombie” Roommate To Death After Watching The Walking Dead

A New Mexico man who had been watching TV’s “The Walking Dead” says he fatally beat his friend before he could become a zombie. Grants police spokesman Moses Marquez said Sunday that 23-year-old Christopher Paquin was beaten and that 23-year-old Damon Perry is being held on a murder charge.

Sadly it appears that the above was only alcohol related rather than crank driven.

However this one is definitely ETOH^2:

Mother and daughter struck and killed [while fighting about excess drinking] on N.M. 599

 Lt. Andrea Dobyns of the Santa Fe Police Department said the two women were traveling with a female friend when they stopped their vehicle and got into an altercation that escalated to violence.

Maybe this will put me over the edge...

Art Work

Following on from thought #1, Residue, this is thought #2 from my failed nap a couple weeks ago. If Art is always the useless bits leftover from cultural development, what comprises those bits right now? I'm not smart enough to jump the entire paradigm, but I do have this much:

Harking back to my whole schtick with the Prisoner's Dilemma where the "rational" solution -- defect -- is the "obvious" strategy which maximizes-reward and minimizes-risk over the short term. This optimizes well for evolutionary natural selection in a scarce and hostile environment, but results in a slightly less beneficial overall outcome -- versus cooperate -- for both parties over the long term.

And the long term is significant these days.

Thanks to over fitting, the Social Darwinists of the 19th century are no longer with us -- except in the guise of Libertarian economists -- but we still don't really think outside of the risk/reward box.

I recently attended an SFI talk by an evolutionary roboticist who, as an aside, complained that his evolved robots did not do so well in the long term. When I suggested that other fitness functions might be tried he pretty much dismissed the idea because they would be out-competed in the short term (in my own self-serving paraphrase of the interchange...).

But what if we try to do evolution with different utility functions?

• What's the best option for the common good?
• How can we all have the most fun?
• Can I be the best improvisational drummer in the ensemble?
• What would make the prettiest rainbows come out of my unicorn's butt?

In a our real, resource limited, and hostile environment these would be considered counter-fitness functions. However Artificial Life can evolve in a plentiful and benevolent environment of our own making. The problem is that this has no application to the 'real world' (thus far?) and so it is not of interest as a scientific research topic. (There is work on cooperation and altruism, from plants to humans, but the central question usually reverts to the basic economic risk/reward formula, "How does this wasteful behavior contribute to the improvement of the individual's position?")

If it's not Science, then what is it?

...Art...

Residue

(This is the result of not being able to nap after not being able to sleep before getting up too early...)

Art is the residue of culture on two levels.

In the first sense, art objects are the artifacts left over after all use-value has been extracted, i.e., when things have no further function they become Art. Pictures on a wall.

(Here the reader may insert an argument about design and craftsmanship and/or a counter argument about bad design.)

However in Level II of my alternate historicity, The Arts are the residue.

Lets say that Dark Ages newspapers had a monthly Arts section which covered everything from Hildegard von Bingen to Leonardo da Vinci.

Then later, during the Enlightenment, it became the Arts and Natural Philosophy page.

After which Science got it's own weekly publication, leaving us with the Art and Humanities magazine.

...und-so-weiter...

Until now: The Arts and Entertainment sunday supplement.

The point being that The Arts are always the residue of cultural ferment, calving off new areas of development. An interesting field of endeavor splits off and Art is left holding the spare parts bag.

Now. What if we split Entertainment off? After some bloody skirmishes, movies, TV, pop-music, yadayadayada, get their own section of the net, and The Arts gets the rest -- say Art and Culture. Opera, Symphony, Literature, Galleries, Museums, all the stuff that signifies sophistication to consummate 10%ers.

Then Culture can be excised. The historically significant art gallery and concert hall spectacles are all stuffed into convenient wallets and the surplus is renamed Arts and Ideas, where Ideas are what's left of late 20th century art.

So, ultimately Art is the leftover stew from whence Ideas bubble. When one of those New Ideas gains credence it becomes its own field leaving the unnecessary bits behind as The Arts. And without The Arts broth, New Ideas do not gestate.