[HN Gopher] MIT, Autodesk develop AI that can figure out Lego in...
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MIT, Autodesk develop AI that can figure out Lego instructions
Author : samizdis
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-07-28 06:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| mech422 wrote:
| I'd be more impressed if they can figure out Ikea directions :-P
| sschueller wrote:
| I actually find ikea instructions quite clear and reasonable. I
| don't know why so many people have a hard time with it. Maybe
| spacial awareness is not something you can learn easily.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| I get a real B&W experience with Ikea - it would be
| interesting to have a technical writing expert compare the
| Ikea instructions and the Lego instructions. Lego seems to
| generally be accepted as more universally simple, and yet
| Ikea products frequently have fewer parts and steps.
| breuleux wrote:
| I find both quite clear. I think the main difference is
| that it's a lot more frustrating if you mess up a step in
| Ikea instructions than in a Lego build. So if you're bad at
| spatial reasoning or following instructions, you can still
| have fun with Lego, you'll just need to redo some steps
| sometimes and you might not even remember it, but the same
| kind of mistake with Ikea will throw you in a fit of rage.
| deelowe wrote:
| Ehh. Ikea instructions have their issues:
|
| - branching paths aren't well marked
|
| - I often find typos (e.g. go to page 16 when it's really
| page 17)
|
| - parts page sometimes doesn't match the supplied parts
| in terms of size and shape
|
| - it's not always clear when parts are optional
|
| - some things come as separate pieces and it's not clear
| how they go together as the instructions are for each
| piece and not the entire assembly
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| I hope Ikea is reading this!
| corrral wrote:
| I don't get it either. Every single non-Ikea flat-pack thing
| I've assembled has had _much_ worse instructions than Ikea.
| Plus usually been more expensive and lower quality than the
| Ikea equivalent.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| There is an app that's been linked on HN a few times called
| Brickit. It analyzes a picture you took of a pile of Legos,
| identifies pieces with object recognition, then uses AR to
| highlight exactly which pieces to grab to build a model. If
| there's such thing as a beautiful app, this is it.
|
| https://brickit.app/
| upupandup wrote:
| a bit off topic, but is there like a more affordable lego like
| alternative? it really disgusts me how expensive lego and
| litigous they are. so many Americans live in poverty who would
| love to get their kids to play with lego but can't because its
| ridiculously expensive.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I'm not sure how they compare in price but I really enjoyed
| erector set and k'nex when I was a kid 30 years ago. And now
| I'm a robotics engineer!
|
| Also, an Ender 3 3D printer provides a lot of similar
| construction skills and learning (with the printed objects) for
| the price of one high end Lego set.
| londons_explore wrote:
| +1 to buying a child a 3d printer. There are okayish ones for
| about $140 now. About age 6-8 seems like a good time.
|
| Set them up with an easy to use bit of cad software and show
| them how to 3d print a cube... Then let them 3d print
| whatever they want to make.
|
| 3d printers have hot parts - let them burn their fingers once
| or twice and they'll soon learn which bits not to touch.
| After that, a 3d printer is pretty safe. Test it first, but
| generally the motors aren't strong enough to crush a finger
| placed in the wrong spot.
|
| The only downside is many 3d prints take 1 hour + to print,
| which is pretty frustrating for a child. You need another
| activity to entertain them during printing breaks.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I have no kids but I definitely found that waiting for the
| print was tough! Often what I do now is I get all my design
| work done at night. have fun getting design features
| sorted, or searching online libraries for printable parts,
| then get everything configured and start the print before
| bed. Watch the first layer or two to make sure it's gonna
| work, and then go to sleep while its printing. I wake up
| and the print is done!
|
| idk if this would work for kids but it works for me! it
| also means that prints which are 8-10 hours don't feel
| long, because I start it an hour before bed time, then as I
| am waking up and doing my morning routine the print is on
| its last few bits!
| Kosirich wrote:
| I have to ask whether or not you are referencing some specific
| sets, like high-end Porsche, Lambo ect. or are you talking
| about LEGO in general, as it seems you have an axe to grind.
|
| If you are genuine about your inquiry, then at this very moment
| there are 3 supermarkets around me with a toy aisle and a
| discount basket which includes discounted LEGO sets (30-50%),
| either due to products running out or box being damaged. I'm
| assuming there is something similar near you.
|
| Second, and more important, if you or someone close to you work
| with an organization that helps kids living in poverty, you are
| welcome and encouraged to contact LEGO directly and ask for
| help. They have several organizations and initiatives inside
| the group that help either by directly donating sets or by
| donating money for other needs.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Thrift stores have piles and piles of Legos. I've seen various
| small stores around that sell Legos in bulk. They'll have huge
| bins, and you can buy them by the pound. I used to buy a few
| official Lego sets back in the day, but also I would buy the
| big bucket of generic blocks. They were cheap and gave you a
| huge stockpile.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| If the 400 billion or so Lego pieces that have been produced
| were pulled out of the attics and garages of the world, the
| market would collapse over night. I have at least $2k worth of
| Lego in two giant tubs in my garage, collected over the years
| my now 20yo son was growing up. I honestly have no idea what to
| do with them - they're surprisingly hard to give away and I
| don't feel like dealing with eBay.
|
| Sadly, I suspect most of the pieces out there are in landfills
| or the oceans.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Try Craigslist. That's how I sold a lot of them locally with
| little effort.
| Knufferlbert wrote:
| Stumbled over a (German speaking) youtuber, "Held der Steine"
| (Hero of the stones)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVtbNWH_9So
|
| Who reviews "Bricks" of all kinds including Lego. He
| consistently is annoyed by how expensive Lego is compared to
| everything else, with usual worse quality (in terms of design,
| fun to assemble, etc). If you can bear google translate or even
| speak German, he may be worth listening to.
|
| Anyway, got sucked into that and got my first "brick" set since
| around 25 years ago and it felt like Lego (as far as I could
| remember). Instructions, presentation, the stones, everything.
|
| I believe "Cobi" and "Bluebrixx" are often mentioned as good,
| affordable (seems about half price for similar set) and lego
| compatible. From what I understand the patent for the
| particular form factor of the bricks ran out, which is why
| there are a bunch of alternative now.
|
| I got that one: https://cobitoys.de/small-army-ww2/panzer-und-
| fahrzeuge/panz...
|
| I live in the UK, think I got it via amazon, so maybe more
| difficult for you Americans.
| ctoth wrote:
| Try going to <yourcity>.craigslist.org and searching for Lego
| in the For Sale section. You'll likely find bulk Lego for super
| cheap.
| corrral wrote:
| Toys--even Lego--are damn near free if you aren't picky and
| will accept whatever you can find used. Often they're
| _literally_ free. Kids often outgrow toys before they 're
| worn out or broken, and for some reason people hate giving
| used toys as gifts so there are just tons and tons of them
| always being dumped on the used market, with relatively
| little demand.
|
| You could set out with a $20 bill and outfit a 6-year-old
| with a totally adequate set of toys, from scratch, by just
| walking a neighborhood on a yard sale day.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Who outgrows Lego? The only exception to that is my Lego
| went to my nephews, pretty much only because I don't have
| the space for it in my apartment.
| Fricken wrote:
| If I value my childhood Lego by how much playtime I got out of
| it, then it's the cheapest of my toys growing up.
|
| Then my sister used it after me, and then my cousin, and now
| that old box of Lego is now part of my cousin's kids
| collection. Some of those pieces are 40 years old and still in
| use. What a deal!
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Interestingly, people were predicting[0] in 2018 that the robotic
| equivalent of this task would be solved by 2023:
|
| > The team also predicts that by the year 2023, a machine will be
| able to "physically assemble any Lego set given the pieces and
| instructions, using non-specialized robotics hardware." The paper
| cites University of California Berkeley research that showed a
| machine joining two Lego pieces together in 2016 through
| reinforcement learning.
|
| [0] https://www.inverse.com/article/44660-lego-building-ai-
| robot...
| dekhn wrote:
| I developed an AI to do this- well, I guess it wasn't artificial.
| I had a kid, and after showing him a few times (and correcting
| some mistakes due to the instructions sometimes being... as
| sparse as technically possible....) he had no problem. Now the
| issue is getting rid of all the 5-year-old Hogwarts Castles,
| etc...
| javajosh wrote:
| Feel free to break them down and ship them to me, or some other
| parent of a young kid. Those sets are expensive!
| O__________O wrote:
| Official Research Page:
|
| https://cs.stanford.edu/~rcwang/projects/lego_manual/
|
| - which includes the paper, code and video.
| peterlk wrote:
| Side note about MITs marketing... The original paper [0] was
| published by 5 authors. 3 from Stanford, 1 from MIT, and 1 from
| Autodesk.
|
| I find MITs aggressive marketing pretty off-putting. Any
| discovery related to MIT _always_ has MIT in the headline, even
| if their involvement was secondary. It's annoying and makes me
| feel like MIT cares more about optics than good research. If I'm
| not alone in this belief, MIT will erode their brand by doing so.
| They certainly have for me.
|
| [0] https://cs.stanford.edu/~rcwang/projects/lego_manual/
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > If I'm not alone in this belief, MIT will erode their brand
| by doing so. They certainly have for me.
|
| They already eroded their brand when they provided cover for
| Jeffrey Epstein.
| intrasight wrote:
| Brings back an old memory. I took CMU's AI class in 1986. Most
| CMU classes were really two classes - one about the lectures and
| one about learning to hack. I did my project for this class in
| Lisp and wrote an engine to solve Lego assembly problems. While
| testing, I gave it a problem to solve, and it came up with a
| better solution than mine. Was my first AI eureka moment.
| LionTamer wrote:
| That sounds really interesting. It was awhile ago so you may
| not remember, but how did you "operationalize" the problem? I
| wonder how that kind of problem / task is structured.
| intrasight wrote:
| The problem was structured with two inputs. 1. the available
| Lego pieces. 2. the structure to be built. At least that's
| what I remember.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| I wonder what they taught the AI first to make enough money to be
| able to afford legos?
| stinkytaco wrote:
| This is entirely beside the point, but I think Lego instructions
| were my first real foray into technical documentation. It's
| surprising how well they worked. Their ability to boil down a
| complicated process into something a 10 year old could follow was
| impressive. As I got older I sort of dismissed them as
| antithetical to creativity, but after doing Lego robotics with
| some kids I began to realize the value I got from them.
| mlyle wrote:
| > As I got older I sort of dismissed them as antithetical to
| creativity
|
| Yah, there's a lot of criticism of the "directions".
|
| My kids build big elaborate modular buildings from the
| directions... and then leave them as-is...
|
| And then try to build equivalently complicated things from
| loose bricks (sometimes copying a little bit of a mechanism or
| a trick they've seen elsewhere).
|
| I think the instructions are great. They just shouldn't be the
| be-all, end-all.
| disconcision wrote:
| yup. the blocks themselves give you the first-order building
| components, and then the instructions give you an
| increasingly library of higher-order building components to
| work with... like reading code
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| More so that they do it with few words and mostly images and
| icons.
| samstave wrote:
| AS AN ASIDE; When I was a young'n I had a lot of legos - but my
| granfather was a nuclear engineer with GE... (helped build
| Hanford)
|
| There was a technical design/drafting book in his book case I
| picked up where I was around ~6 or so...
|
| I drew every single diagram/ortho/iso whatever in that book.
| Multiple times.
|
| When I got into middle school, I was opted to elect a
| highschool class, and I chose technical drafting...
|
| When I went to class, the textbook was the same one from my
| grandfathers bookcase - I sailed through that, and then...
|
| This was what got me into design and architecture and CAD... I
| then setup the first cad network in my highschool, while I was
| still in 7th grade.
|
| I was in VOCAD by 9th, and came in second in the CAD Olympics
| in 1993 (I was the fastest ever to finish the test in 30
| minutes, on a 3 hour deadline.)
|
| THE ENTIRE POINT BEING ;
|
| Get kids in front of technical design/docs/whatever is complex
| as EARLY as possible.
|
| There is no loss in teaching a toddler calculus. They may wind
| up being a flamboyant broadway star, but at least they can
| maths.
| amelius wrote:
| > They may wind up being a flamboyant broadway star, but at
| least they can maths.
|
| What fun is it to be a broadway star when you know maths?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I know calculus and programming and all those neat things.
| Acting and performing are still great fun
| beambot wrote:
| Understanding that the world and your interests may not be
| one dimensional... ;)
| asadlionpk wrote:
| You can calculate probability of success as a broadway
| star.
| samstave wrote:
| AAAAAND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR AND FIVE AND SIX AND SASHE
| AND TURN THAT NOMIAL INTO A PRIME AND FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT!
| HANDS LADIES!!! LET ME SEE YOUR JAZZ HANDS TIMES THE SQUARE
| ROOT OF SEVEN DIVIDED BY THE OUTPUT OF THE GLITTER
| FACTORY!!!
|
| Sounds like it could be fun.
| rkangel wrote:
| An enormous amount of effort has gone into making Lego
| instructions as clear as they are, regardless of what age you
| are and what language you speak. They really show what is
| possible.
| corrral wrote:
| The new ones are _much_ clearer than they used to be in the
| 80s and 90s.
|
| I'm convinced the old-style ones were the reason I buried the
| needle the one time I was given a cognitive test that
| _specifically_ tested spatial reasoning. The old sets '
| instructions were basically 3d spot-the-difference puzzles,
| in which orientation might even change between states, so
| they were pretty much _training_ for that kind of test.
|
| The new ones have a little of that, but a lot more arrows
| pointing things out, little insets highlighting important
| parts, et c. Plus they put the pieces in numbered bags so you
| don't have them all out at once, for medium-sized or larger
| sets! Much, much easier than they used to be.
|
| Flip side is the old ones used larger pieces, on average. The
| modern sets are all fiddly, tiny bricks, which does make them
| a little harder to assemble (and _much_ harder--nearly
| impossible--to repair from memory if they 're damaged during
| play)
| Swizec wrote:
| Now if they could print them in higher quality so I'm not
| constantky guessing if that's a black piece or dark blue ...
|
| Maybe I'm older and my color vision isn't as good as it used
| to be, but damn it's frustrating.
| TylerE wrote:
| I don't think it's the printing. The downloadable pdfs have
| the same issues
| rkagerer wrote:
| This is begging for someone to make a robot using MEPNet that can
| assemble any kit for which you show it the instructions.
|
| Bonus points if it's made out of Lego and can build itself.
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