[HN Gopher] Show HN: AI climbing coach - visualize how to climb ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Show HN: AI climbing coach - visualize how to climb any route based
       on your body
        
       I made SABR - an AI model that helps you visualize the
       beta/technique on any route, based on your body parameters. You can
       input a video of you climbing any route, in any orientation or
       lighting condition (it's truly versatile!). SABR then creates a
       virtual avatar of your body shape and uses it to climb the route
       you're climbing. Then, you can compare/contrast.  You can see the
       demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnvNPWoYZz4  Will be
       open sourcing the model, backend, and frontend codebase soon!
        
       Author : smandava
       Score  : 167 points
       Date   : 2024-05-06 08:09 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (climbing.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (climbing.ai)
        
       | gus_massa wrote:
       | Does the AI create the 3D model from a static camera?
       | 
       | Can I choose the color of the avatar? (It's not an important
       | feature, but people will love it.)
       | 
       | Does it work with natural walls? (I guess the artificial walls
       | have "handles" with an standard size that makes guesing the scale
       | easier for the computer.)
        
         | smandava wrote:
         | - it creates a 3D model of you based on the first second of
         | your body in the video. How the video is recorded does affect
         | how the 3D avatar looks.
         | 
         | - don't have that functionality but its really easy to
         | implement.
         | 
         | - ideally, it works for anything. I will attach some outputs of
         | it climbing outdoor routes. The model doesn't know what a wall
         | means. It just has seen enough data of people climbing that it
         | can somehow correlate certain features in videos to certain
         | human movements.
        
           | gus_massa wrote:
           | My guess is that for the computer it's easier in an
           | artificial wall becasue features are standarized.
           | 
           | (Disclaimer: I never climbed a wall, but from time to time I
           | fall in the https://www.youtube.com/@AlbertOkay rabit hole.
           | In particular this video looks relevant for my question
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onXrJ5sX9BU (but I din't
           | watch it yet.))
        
             | smandava wrote:
             | Yeah it performs best with indoor bouldering videos with
             | spread out holds and great lighting. I will post examples
             | of it climbing natural walls in the paper. Will send soon.
        
       | smandava wrote:
       | Note:
       | 
       | Will attach more example outputs and make a detailed document
       | about how the model was built and the research behind it. If this
       | is interesting to you, feel free to sign up to the waitlist on
       | www.climbing.ai (and make sure to sign up for our Discord!)
       | 
       | I originally planned on open sourcing the model, data, weights,
       | and code. Only a few people (me and a couple friends) have access
       | to the hosted model on the web app.
       | 
       | If enough people are on the waitlist, I will consider releasing
       | access. This is very expensive to run so was only considering
       | open sourcing it.
       | 
       | Note: the model works well sometimes, but most of the times it
       | does not. This is an early research preview. Please tamper any
       | expectations. A really good general model requires millions of
       | videos and much more training time so it is really prohibitively
       | expensive. As mentioned before, if someone has the compute, all
       | they have to do is scale the existing dataset and training
       | pipeline (which I will publish open-source in the coming weeks).
        
         | ethbr1 wrote:
         | High-level details about how you tackled the various sub-
         | problems would be useful.
         | 
         | I assume, at minimum, there's:                  - Segmentation
         | of moving elements        - 3d reconstruction from 2d video
         | - Reverse kinematics        - Identification of holds        -
         | Search for potential climbing path        - Generation of
         | kinematics for path
        
           | hirako2000 wrote:
           | Likely looking to see a 100k emails list before really
           | thinking about all these problems to solve and well.
           | 
           | Worst case able to build this, scenario, author builds
           | something else entirely.
        
             | ethbr1 wrote:
             | Afaict, author already built a proof of concept.
        
         | icpmacdo wrote:
         | I've been working on the same thing, there is an interesting
         | quote from back in the day and its either make your program
         | faster or wait 6 months for the computers to get faster. I look
         | at it the same way now with Key Point Analysis and Pose
         | Estimation libraries.
         | 
         | I think OSS is best for this category right now.
        
       | jfengel wrote:
       | I look forward to playing with this. It seems astonishing.
        
         | smandava wrote:
         | I will be open sourcing the codebase and model. Due to compute
         | and training dataset size constraints, the model is not exactly
         | "production ready". I have (and am) cherry picking rare
         | examples of it where it is decent. You can play around with it
         | when I open source it but truly good results require multiple
         | millions of dollars (but it really is a linear scaling of
         | compute and dataset).
        
       | goodmattg wrote:
       | A few thoughts as I've done academic research & built products in
       | this area:
       | 
       | - if you're using SMPL body parameters this will have to stay
       | research / open-source - is this leveraging some sort of
       | monocular depth estimation to estimate the wall in 3D space?
       | Also, do you have assumed camera parameters, or is that also
       | estimated? If there isn't any depth information, this will be
       | highly inaccurate on any cliff routes, but still useful on flat
       | wall climbing.
       | 
       | Overall, a good idea (that I've also thought about building as a
       | climber) - the tricky part that I'm impressed you have a solution
       | to is path planning up the wall. Even assuming a flat wall with
       | no depth estimation, it's still looks effective.
        
         | syntaxing wrote:
         | Not OP, but why does it have to be open sourced? Copy left
         | license?
        
           | goodmattg wrote:
           | commercial license - the research group formed a corporate
           | entity that licenses the body model and all derived work
           | (SMPL-X, etc.): https://meshcapade.com/SMPL
        
         | ethbr1 wrote:
         | > _the tricky part that I 'm impressed you have a solution to
         | is path planning up the wall._
         | 
         | I'm assuming this is evolutionary / brute force of some nature,
         | given OP's comments about it being expensive to run.
        
       | prions wrote:
       | It looks really interesting, but as an experienced climber I'm
       | not sure if just watching a video of my avatar climbing would
       | really help with skill acquisition.
       | 
       | Also, this claims that the wall type or video quality doesn't
       | matter, but I have a hard time understanding how the model would
       | be able to understand that a small crimp could possibly be dual
       | textured and therefore has only a few specific ways of
       | approaching it.
       | 
       | So it seems that this is more for visualizing a climb (which is a
       | skill most climbers should develop) and not really for dialing in
       | some sort of microbeta for a problem.
        
         | etrautmann wrote:
         | Agreed - so much about the detail of how you would climb
         | something comes down to details that would be hard to measure
         | with a camera, like textures, your estimate of friction, etc.
         | Very cool idea though, looks fun to test.
        
           | sandworm101 wrote:
           | And this is deep into "sport climbing", borderline gym rat
           | territory imho. It doesn't model all the other core aspects
           | such as protection, rope management, exposure and rest stops.
           | I imaging if you pointed this at a real cliff and recorded
           | several assents it would quickly become a blurry-twitchy mess
           | as all the movements not touching the rock spoiled the data.
           | Maybe for bouldering, but not for real climbing.
        
             | soperj wrote:
             | What makes rope climbing "real"?
        
               | lambdaone wrote:
               | There are lots more variables to consider, particularly
               | in lead climbing, even when you have a bolted route. And
               | trad climbing is even more complex than that.
        
         | logtempo wrote:
         | I don't see the shape of the holds being a big problem. With
         | some help from indoor companies and hold makers, figuring out
         | which hold model is on the wall should be possible.
         | 
         | As for the usefullness of the software, I'm sceptical too as it
         | don't really solve a problem. But maybe I'm not seeing it and
         | it could be good for beginners :) A good improvement would be
         | adding a comparison between you and the model in term of body
         | position and fluidity of movements.
        
           | party_possum wrote:
           | The idea of incorporating actual hold data and "recognizing"
           | specific holds is interesting, but I'm not sure it completely
           | solves the problem.
           | 
           | The "Boss" from Pusher is arguably the most famous climbing
           | hold ever made. For a decade or more, every gym had one, but
           | they were all unique. Lots of them had micro chips that
           | became critical to usage of the hold. Some had decent texture
           | and some were glassy smooth from years and years and years of
           | use. A lot of the accidental variation in new holds has gone
           | away as the industry has standardized around a handful of
           | industrial fabricators like Aragon, but even over the course
           | of a single indoor boulder problem's life, the accumulation
           | of chalk, sweat, and shoe rubber can have a significant
           | impact on how a hold climbs.
           | 
           | I guess the real question is, do these changes just make
           | routes _harder_ or do they make them fundamentally
           | _different_? Do they actually change the set of moves that
           | constitutes the easiest way to the top? To be honest, I 'm
           | not entirely sure. But it's something interesting to think
           | about.
        
             | alexcp_ wrote:
             | Exactly, holds will evolve as they get used and more
             | polished, even indoors. Climbing a Moonboard with a new set
             | of holds is quite different than climbing on one with older
             | more polished holds, even if it's the exact same problem
             | and the same holds.
             | 
             | It's an interesting project and it could be fun to watch,
             | but it's completely useless.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | Couldn't you reverse-reason about that?
               | 
               | To me, the customer here would be climbing gyms, offering
               | a service to climbers.                  1. Set up camera
               | on routes        2. Record all climbs        3. Reason
               | through hold details        4. Generate potential
               | movements        5. Show climbs vs ghost movements
               | 6. Feedback to tune model
               | 
               | 3 being accomplished by reasoning "if a movement should
               | be possible using the identified hold, but no one
               | successfully does it, the hold must be misidentified or
               | have different properties."
        
               | alexcp_ wrote:
               | But what is the point? Finding the optimal movements that
               | are needed to complete a climb is not useful if you are
               | not strong enough to execute it.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | The point in this thread seemed to be "real world holds
               | have different properties, and that defines possible
               | approaches to holds."
               | 
               | To which I pointed out that, with enough data, you could
               | reason backwards to figure out their properties.
               | 
               | Assuming that's solved, if the question is "What is the
               | point?" then I'd answer the same point as golf swing
               | analysis -- structured comparison feedback for continual
               | improvement.
               | 
               | "Have you thought about trying X move at Y point?" or
               | "You're trying X move at Y point, but here's how you
               | differ from someone successfully doing it" both seem
               | useful feedback.
               | 
               | And essentially what's manually generated now, from
               | someone watching and then providing feedback.
               | 
               | With regards to strength, hell, if you wanted to get
               | fancy you could also deduce a specific user's strength,
               | comparing their moves against others' moves on the same
               | features.
        
           | Zanfa wrote:
           | > I don't see the shape of the holds being a big problem.
           | With some help from indoor companies and hold makers,
           | figuring out which hold model is on the wall should be
           | possible.
           | 
           | Even if you know the exact hold model and it's in pristine
           | condition, it's basically impossible to tell how it's gonna
           | work from a single angle on video at a distance. Even tiny
           | variations in angle of the wall and rotation of the hold on
           | the wall can completely change how you use it.
        
         | Snackchez wrote:
         | What could be interesting is if you could compare your attempts
         | to the avatar climbing and receiving feedback afterwards. This
         | would effectively be a step up from simply recording your send
         | attempts.
        
         | petsfed wrote:
         | I suspect that, absent that information about the exact right
         | way to grab a hold, or the exact way to put a foot on a hold,
         | you'll be limited to beta _suggestions_ , which is fine, I
         | think. It'd be like having a group of other climbers nearby to
         | suggest different beta, even if you don't have any friends.
         | 
         | So, in terms of solving complicated beta faster, I see real
         | utility to this.
         | 
         | It is very interesting that since the AI climber is trained on
         | actual climbers, it could, in principle, provide beta to climb
         | consistent with your own style. If you train the bot
         | exclusively on footage of yourself, it would return movement
         | based on your style. If your style is finessy-all-backstep-all-
         | the-time (aka The Edlinger), it can provide beta consistent
         | with that. If your style is to square up and pull (otherwise
         | known as The American), it can provide beta consistent with
         | that instead.
        
       | piterrro wrote:
       | Nice! Cant wait to try it!
        
       | aconz2 wrote:
       | Very interesting, do wish we could play with it since it is a
       | show hn, maybe repost when it is open sourced/usable. Looking
       | forward to reading about how it works. How does it know which
       | holds are on? How does it know what the top is? Are those inputs
       | or inferred or is it just end to end completing likely body
       | positions one after the other?
        
       | DanBC wrote:
       | Be interesting to see if climbers like it - I'd love to see Wide
       | Boys testing it out.
        
       | greenie_beans wrote:
       | cool technical project, but as a climber, part of the fun is
       | solving the problem with the help of my own brain and the brains
       | of the other climbers around me.
        
       | kettunen wrote:
       | One of the most fun part of climbing is the problem-solving
       | aspect of it. Figuring your way to get up the wall/boulder. Why
       | would you want to get rid of that?
        
         | rokkamokka wrote:
         | As with any tutor, this could (possibly) help beginners.
        
         | _fs wrote:
         | Do you enjoy climbing with others? Personally, I enjoy seeing
         | the different beta on a climb, especially between different
         | body types. It is interesting seeing unique approaches to the
         | same problem.
        
         | hacksoi wrote:
         | You can use it after you do the climb to see if there is a more
         | optimal solution.
        
         | NegativeK wrote:
         | Where the fun is is an opinion.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | What about when you try to solve the problem and you get stuck
         | and can't? Or solve it but in a bad way that requires way too
         | much exertion?
         | 
         | The point is to try to solve it yourself, then compare with an
         | expert solution, and therefore learn how to improve.
         | 
         | If you're just blindly trying to problem-solve through trial
         | and error without ever comparing against expert feedback,
         | you're going to learn climbling _extremely_ slowly...
        
           | Tronno wrote:
           | Getting stuck is part of the game. It could take several
           | sessions or it could take several years. It's what makes a
           | climb truly hard, a "project".
           | 
           | It's an essential part of the sport - the satisfaction of
           | using one's own body and mind to overcome the seemingly
           | impossible.
           | 
           | If you never get stuck, how could you possibly experience it?
        
       | silentsea90 wrote:
       | Very cool!! I am unfortunately very far from an AI expert. Can
       | you share how you built this? Did you have to train your own
       | model, or is it an open source model that you finetuned for
       | climbing?
        
       | justinnhli wrote:
       | I have had a similar idea for the past few years: less an AI
       | model that takes in a photo and generates a video, more a
       | movement planning tool given a 3D model of the wall.
       | 
       | Echoing some of the other comments, I think it would be more
       | interesting to not just see a single avatar climbing the problem,
       | but to see many possible approaches to the same problem, even for
       | climbers with the same body type. This way, even skilled climbers
       | that are stuck on a problem can consider alternate
       | beta/techniques that they may find easier to execute.
        
       | gazelle21 wrote:
       | Wow, this is great!
       | 
       | I do BJJ and wonder how it could AI models could help. I find
       | watching tape to help, not only myself but everyone who I know
       | has recorded their matches has found it helpful.
        
       | blobbers wrote:
       | Fun! How does it know what route you're climbing, if you can't
       | climb it? >_> Sorry if that's an obvious question.
       | 
       | Does it just tell you how it would climb things you can already
       | climb?
        
       | hangonhn wrote:
       | This is really cool from a technology point of view but the main
       | attraction of climbing for me is figuring out how to "solve" the
       | climb. Trying to solve a crux with a buddy is half of the fun for
       | me.
        
         | eigelc wrote:
         | And a quarter of the other half is asking people in the gym how
         | to do it.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | Right, but for people in their first couple of years of
         | climbing, it can be really helpful to try to solve it, then see
         | what the AI coach says, examine the diff, and thereby improve
         | your solving and climbing skills.
         | 
         | I have definitely discovered in my life that I learn probably
         | 10x faster in situations where I can try something, and then
         | _immediately_ compare it with an expert solution. Rather than
         | just trying and trying and trying on my own.
         | 
         | And once you're experienced in climbing (like you probably
         | are), then of course you don't need to compare anymore. The joy
         | is in the solving. But expert solutions are _really_ helpful to
         | _get_ to the point where you can consider yourself experienced,
         | so much more quickly.
        
           | et-al wrote:
           | With bouldering, the set of moves is fairly limited and what
           | actually prevents someone from pulling harder comes down to
           | flexibility, core strength, and contact strength.
        
             | crazygringo wrote:
             | OK, but the submission and conversation here isn't about
             | bouldering.
             | 
             | This is about wall climbing where there's lots of choice
             | for moves.
        
               | IanCal wrote:
               | I'm not sure what definition you're using here but the
               | example video on the main page is bouldering.
        
       | alexcaza wrote:
       | Cool idea! My friends and I have chatted about building something
       | similar, though with a coaching focus. Specifically for use with
       | spray walls/kilterboards/etc.
       | 
       | It could be interesting to combine something like this with an
       | analysis tool. Analyse a climbers attempts or successes and
       | compare it to the beta figured out by the model. Then offer tips
       | on body positioning or technique based on your
       | weight/height/strength.
        
       | programmarchy wrote:
       | Not a climber myself but this is super impressive. Curious about
       | what techniques you're using. Is this based on a GAN model?
        
       | party_possum wrote:
       | It would be really interesting to build an instance of this model
       | trained on world cup footage for a few reasons.
       | 
       | - Like all of these things, your training data matters and the
       | internet is awash with videos of people climbing badly. A lot of
       | people specifically post "I can't climb this, what am I doing
       | wrong?" videos. World cup climbers are, by the nature of the
       | competition, extremely talented and technically proficient
       | climbers. Even when they fail, they fail in smart interesting
       | ways.
       | 
       | - There's lots of high quality video footage out there. Heck, the
       | problems are even set with visual clarity in mind which would
       | help when parsing that footage. There's potentially enough video
       | to train instances on individual climbers. You could run side by
       | sides like "How would Tamoa climb this and how would Janja climb
       | this?".
       | 
       | - World cup problems are stylistically distinct. They involve
       | lots of moves "typical" climbers will never ever encounter. Many
       | climbers will look at a typical gym problem and think "I have an
       | idea of how to climb this" but will look at a world cup problem
       | and just think "????????". An app that told you how a problem
       | like that should be climbed might be useful.
       | 
       | There are drawbacks too.
       | 
       | - World cup climbers are outliers, whose physical ability
       | (strength, flexibility, etc.) give them access to kinds of
       | movement that other climbers just don't have. No amount of
       | "knowing the sequence" will get me up a climb that requires a
       | full bat hang (look it up) because I just don't have the ankle
       | strength to do the movement.
       | 
       | - World cup "style" is only commonly used at high level comps and
       | in very large commercial gyms. It's probably not extremely
       | relevant to a typical climbing session.
       | 
       | - World cup problems are very hard. Mostly v10 and up? It would
       | be hilarious to watch a model trained on genetic monsters
       | crushing the world's hardest boulder problems try to tell a
       | doughy office worker (me) how to climb v2.
        
       | takk309 wrote:
       | Could this be used to grade routes? It would be cool if a photo
       | or short video of a route could be used to better assist in
       | grading climbing routes. Grading is a massively subjective thing,
       | to some extent, so this could be super tricky.
        
         | et-al wrote:
         | I only watched the video, but without taking in account the
         | texture of the holds, the grading aspect would be limited.
         | 
         | One also learns to just recalibrate according to regions. E.g.
         | climbing 11d at one gym, versus 12a at another.
        
           | mordechai9000 wrote:
           | Also, how will the AI know when it is appropriate to inflate
           | the grade to make the climbing seem harder, and when it is
           | appropriate to sandbag so I can pretend a route is easier for
           | me than it actually is?
        
             | takk309 wrote:
             | Easy, it'll just grade everything 5.9+!
        
       | latchkey wrote:
       | Of course everyone on HN is focused on the climbing / beta /
       | technique aspect of this.
       | 
       | It is ok that it is a solution looking for a problem. There is
       | obviously no 'business' or 'product' here. It isn't like there is
       | a payment link on the page or anything.
       | 
       | What I'd like to see the comments focus on is that we should just
       | be happy that someone is making the effort to learn more about AI
       | and building tooling around it. Experimentation is king.
       | 
       | They've put their work out into the open (soon to be open sourced
       | even!), not to be criticized over whether it is useful or not,
       | but just that they created something that could spawn other
       | interesting things that solve real world use cases.
       | 
       | Huge kudos for doing this work.
        
       | party_possum wrote:
       | Climbing route setting (when done at a high level) is constantly
       | in conversation with itself. Many climbers don't realize that
       | there are trends or fads in movement styles that sweep across the
       | industry. This has only picked up steam in an era of social
       | media.
       | 
       | Just like movie dorks will happily spend hours explaining how an
       | individual shot in a movie is actually an insider reference to
       | another movie, and as a result a statement of intent for the
       | movie as a whole, professional route setters will talk your ear
       | off about the way one of their problems embraces or rejects
       | specific kinds of movement trends of the last 6 months.
       | 
       | That intentional rejection is interesting. Many route setters,
       | especially for competitions, are in constant search of novelty.
       | One kind of perfect problem is something that looks confusing and
       | impossible, up until you see it done, at which point it seems
       | almost obvious. It's the feeling of solving a sudoku. But
       | critically, they _want_ climbers to be initially confused.
       | 
       | I wonder if AI might actually be better than humans at sequencing
       | these kinds of problems. Humans bring so much context and
       | experience and expectation to the process that we are easily
       | tricked. AI just looks through a few terabytes of video and says
       | "What about this?".
        
         | chefandy wrote:
         | > I wonder if AI might actually be better than humans at
         | sequencing these kinds of problems
         | 
         | Probably a deeply unpopular take here, but without knowing
         | anything about climbing routes, I'm gonna say _no_. I 'm not
         | saying that they won't have excellent quality output that might
         | even solve problems that human output can't, but the process of
         | creating something is meaningful, even commercially. Surely
         | this will be useful in some respects, but I just don't buy the
         | idea that humanity is destined to passively consume automated
         | algorithm-generated utility products-- _especially_ creative
         | ones-- no matter how smooth, cheap, and clever they might be.
        
           | JadeNB wrote:
           | > the process of creating something is meaningful, even
           | commercially.
           | 
           | That's true, but why does it mean that the answer to the more
           | or less objective question "will AI actually be better than
           | humans at sequencing these kinds of problems?" (As stated
           | it's not really objective, but one could easily come up with
           | metrics like, say, total time to a correct solution, or time
           | spent observing the route or other climbers, or ....) One can
           | imagine other, related questions that are less objective
           | (like "will it be a good idea to integrate this AI assistance
           | into climbing competitions?"), but, to me, the answer to the
           | (implicit) original question has nothing to do with whether
           | or not the activity is meaningful, or with humans' destiny
           | one way or the other.
        
             | chefandy wrote:
             | Sure, they may well be quantitatively better. If you were
             | to create metrics to measure the number of mistakes or
             | weird spots or overly annoying things, it's quite possible
             | that the output from the algorithm could score better than
             | human output, and the throughput would obviously be
             | incomparable. But, whether or not something is
             | qualitatively better is far more subjective-- it's
             | influenced by our culture, our experiences, and everything
             | else that creates the lens through which we see the world.
             | Something's origin absolutely affects the way people
             | experience it, be it a physical object, story, experience,
             | etc. Don't get me wrong-- I realize there's real value in
             | affordable quantity with with mediocre quality-- how many
             | restaurants in the world are McDonald's? But then again,
             | how many restaurants in the world _aren 't_ McDonald's? If
             | McDonald's could sell you a ribeye comparable to Capital
             | Grille, I'd be astonished if it put a dent in Capital
             | Grille's bottom line. Applebees, however...
        
               | JadeNB wrote:
               | Right, those are important considerations, but I don't
               | think that they're the _same_ consideration. If you ask
               | whether a celebrity chef is better at cooking a certain
               | dish than I am, then the answer (no matter the dish, for
               | I 'm not much of a chef) is almost certainly "yes." If I
               | answered instead no, that the provenance of a dish
               | matters, that the celebrity-chef culture is bad for fine
               | dining, and that my wife would rather have the dish made
               | by me, then I think I'd be regarded as missing the point
               | of the question, even if my objections were true on their
               | own.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | Well, I think that celebrity vs husband is not a good
               | analog for human vs generated. I also think that in this
               | case, origin has broader connotations than provenance, in
               | that it includes context. What if the celebrity chef was
               | your wife's brother? What if you had a degenerative
               | neurological disease? What if it was the dish you cooked
               | for her on your second date? Anything can seem very cut
               | and dried if you impose artificial restrictions and
               | examine it in a vacuum. And, because you _can 't_ easily
               | define and quantify things like context, the engineering
               | and tech worlds tend disregard them because they don't
               | really factor into the engineering equation... and that's
               | why designers exist.
        
               | travisjungroth wrote:
               | I think your arguments against AI being better at
               | creating routes reduce to:
               | 
               | 1. You don't like what that would mean about the destiny
               | for humanity.
               | 
               | 2. A human making it makes it inherently better.
               | 
               | 3. If it's lower quality, it's lower quality.
               | 
               | I get why this would lead to strong beliefs. But these
               | arguments aren't very _convincing_.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | I think you probably need to re-read what I wrote. I'm
               | not against AI at all-- I use it all the time. I just
               | don't think it's going to be qualitatively better than
               | human creative output because how something was made
               | matters to people. I also think the tech world thinks
               | they're a lot better at judging creative output than they
               | are.
        
           | petsfed wrote:
           | Well, the tricky bit here is that the route setter, a human,
           | is the one actually solving the problem. So the problem as
           | set is (and must be) a human creation first. This is
           | especially true in outdoor climbing, where the first ascent
           | process might involve the installation of anchor fixtures, or
           | the removal of poorly-secured features for safety. You'd need
           | some pretty wild sensor suites to correctly differentiate
           | between a really good hold, and a dangerous flake that will
           | peel off the wall if the slightest force is applied to it.
           | The AI just generates potential solutions to the problem once
           | the holds are found/placed. Certainly, there's some
           | interesting conversations about how satisfying it is to solve
           | a rubick's cube using somebody's algorithm vs. just figuring
           | it out, but its not like the computer is inventing a rubick's
           | cube.
           | 
           | Embedded in your comment is the idea that AI might create
           | boulder problems or routes in climbing gyms, and the human
           | (or eventually robot) just follows that plan in bolting the
           | holds to the wall. I expect that for a long time, AI
           | generated climbing routes would rarely be good, but would
           | consistently be physiologically impossible, feature
           | uninteresting movement, or be too easy.
           | 
           | Its easy enough to shotgun holds up onto the wall based on
           | some imagined sequence, the real skill of route setting is to
           | (as the GP pointed out) figure out what's physically possible
           | and also fun and challenging.
        
             | chefandy wrote:
             | > You'd need some pretty wild sensor suites to correctly
             | differentiate between a really good hold
             | 
             | Ah, I see.
             | 
             | > The AI just generates potential solutions to the problem
             | once the holds are found/placed
             | 
             | Yeah and I think that's really going to be the sweet spot
             | for generative tools for the forseeable future.
             | 
             | > Its easy enough to shotgun holds up onto the wall based
             | on some imagined sequence, the real skill of route setting
             | is to (as the GP pointed out) figure out what's physically
             | possible and also fun and challenging.
             | 
             | Right right. I have a feeling that making a more convincing
             | substitute is primarily a matter of having less access to
             | data than say, paintings and photography which are
             | certainly not _less_ nuanced than this creative task. But
             | as I said, a lot of people care about how something was
             | made, too. I 'll bet that's going to be a much bigger
             | factor, at least in marketing, than many realize in the
             | near future.
        
             | ethbr1 wrote:
             | > _Embedded in your comment is the idea that AI might
             | create boulder problems or routes in climbing gyms, and the
             | human (or eventually robot) just follows that plan in
             | bolting the holds to the wall._
             | 
             | This would follow the exact path image GenAI evolved
             | through.
             | 
             | Step 1: Teach a model to recognize objects from noisy data.
             | 
             | Step 2: Reverse-feed that model random noise and force it
             | to hallucinate that noise back into likely objects.
             | 
             | As there's probably physics simulation at some point in
             | this particular scenario, there'd probably also be step 3
             | of simulating a climb through the generated path to
             | validate feasibility / specific qualities.
             | 
             | It doesn't sound impossible.
        
               | petsfed wrote:
               | Its certainly not impossible, but that physics simulation
               | is the biggest obstacle that I can see.
        
             | rockfishroll wrote:
             | Spotting a refugee from rockclimbing.com on hacker news was
             | not on my bingo card for the day. But I guess if I'm here
             | (writing novels about route setting) then I shouldn't be
             | surprised other people are too.
        
               | petsfed wrote:
               | Outside of a short-lived usurper on instagram selling pet
               | food dishes, I am still the only petsfed on the internet,
               | since 1997.
               | 
               | What's really wild to me is how somebody would recognize
               | a mid-tier poster from a website I thought effectively
               | defunct for nearly 10 years now.
        
               | rockfishroll wrote:
               | It just goes to show how impactful online communities are
               | capable of being. rockclimbing.com was in it's heyday
               | right as I was discovering climbing. I was a bored kid
               | constructing my entire identity around climbing and there
               | was no other place to do that outside of the gym. No
               | mountain project. No youtube. No social media. I spent a
               | lot of hours lurking those forums. There are only a
               | handful of users I could still name, but I bet I would
               | recognize a _lot_ of them.
        
       | i_am_a_squirrel wrote:
       | If anyone would actually use this (I don't think they would,
       | because the puzzle, and talking about beta is half the fun of
       | climbing)...
       | 
       | ...then this would be very valuable data.
       | 
       | Eventually you could train AI to generate routes, and then you
       | could fire all of your master setters!
       | 
       | Climb setters should unionize and copyright their art before it's
       | too late (like for painters and software developers and
       | musicians)
        
       | Temporary_31337 wrote:
       | I feel like I'm the right audience for this - a not very good
       | climber with unusual distribution of limbs. But I'm not
       | interested - part of the fun in climbing is on sight climbs and
       | solving problems yourself.
        
       | surume wrote:
       | The AI analysed my body and said coldly, "Just take the
       | elevator."
        
       | lambdaone wrote:
       | I'm sceptical about the usefulness of this for a number of
       | reasons, including the points raised by others about hold
       | recognition etc.
       | 
       | It's also difficult to see how the system would work out the 3D
       | arrangement of holds. It can clearly try to infer 3D
       | relationships from video of an existing climb, but it would be
       | hard for it to work out the 3D position or orientation of any
       | holds not used by the climber in the video.
       | 
       | These two put together make solving the climbing problem even
       | more difficult, because appropriate body positions and moves are
       | often very sensitive to even tiny differences in shape, relative
       | position, and orientation of holds; and occluding volumes,
       | aretes, cracks and so can make the problem even harder.
       | 
       | But as a simplified demo, this is cool, and I salute it.
        
       | giantg2 wrote:
       | Probably going to show me the best route to the couch.
        
       | eps wrote:
       | Your demo video is monetized and showing 30 seconds of ads. Might
       | not be a bad idea to switch the ads off.
        
       | alanzhuly wrote:
       | This is really neat. Do you plan to expand this to other sports
       | or activities as well?
        
         | smandava wrote:
         | Maybe! Depends on the reception.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-05-08 23:00 UTC)