I have fallen into youtube videos of competitive high school engineering. It’s got the obscure competitiveness of late '80s World’s Strongest Man competitions all about carrying water casks, but with fewer bulges
First, I learned about Micromouse, where teams/players build maze-solving and run them as fast as possible:
We did a simple version of this with full-size RC cars as an intro assembly class in college, but I had no idea it had a 40-year tradition.
There’s also a line-following version:
cars look more like dragsters here
From there I found slot cars. I have hazy memories of slot car tracks in the back rooms of bowling alleys back when I was a kid. My dad’s nerdy friend who lived alone and apparently only owned beer promotional t-shirts with holes in them was a competitor. When I was eight he gave us his Intellivision and about 40 games! our first game console, although we were only allowed an hour every Saturday.
So apparently pro slot cars are a lot more intense than even Kazuma Kiryu:
I can’t even see these cars and these cars are controlling acceleration!?
Did you guess there are off-road RC Car Championships? Of course there are!
and they’ve got sick jumps
Keep digging and you’ll inevitably end up at:
amateur engineering! Earthquake safety is very important.
The offroad RC cars seem like they’d be really fun to drive.
The slotcars are incomprehensibly fast, and I feel like it wouldn’t even be that fun? Steering is sort of the most fun action you can do in a car; throttle control is pretty boring in comparison.
Actually, as I watch them I realize they’re definitely CPU-controlled, using optical sensors to read the white border of the circle. In seek behavior, they move forward until sensing the border beneath them, turn in one direction 90+ degrees, then move forward again until hitting the border, then repeat. But they appear to have forward sensors as well; if they spot an object before them they charge. Moving around the circle must be a defensive tactic, else they’d just spin in place until they spotted on directly in front.
And that means that the flag-wielding bots use their banners in an attempt to confuse the spotters! If they hold their flags to the side, they are trying to trick the shovel-bots into charging the flag and thus falling off the edge? It doesn’t appear to be more than marginally effective, though…
Confounding this analysis, there are people standing with RC controllers off to the edge. Maybe it’s mixed AI- and human-driven entries? The stupid speed of silicon against the ponderous consideration of flesh?
The first robo fight vid just feels like I’m playing some inscrutable psx game on an emulator, even the music and the lil robot’s footstep sounds. The sort of confusing win condition. The taunts, the attacks that dont connect 90% of the time. Beautiful.
The very first vid was so impressive how smoothly the lil mouse explored the maze, how well it did its little 90 degree turns. And then the second bit totally surprised me.
The earthquake one is the best. Just so entertaining and interesting to watch. And the prize at the end was hilarious lmao.
The outdoor RC one was cool as. It reminded me of RC de Go which was a cool RC game by taito on ps1 with rly clean graphics and it has the same camera following the car from one fixed position as the camera in that video (and I believe the only other game in the De Go family after the densha and jet series)
I’m not sure about their control, but the reaction times of those robots are definitely beyond any human capabilities. Perhaps the remotes are for selecting a program type?
I love how violent it all is. Scuffing up the battle area floor… most matches ending up with either smoke or at least some parts scattered around the place. And the ref is standing there in full leg protection!
Edit: The flag robots are so awesome, but it seems rarely effective. It’s like some crazy bird of paradise mating ritual.
This reminds me of Lego “great ball contraption” machines, which you can search by the term “GBC”, which use a standard ball weight, size and throughput (I think it has to average 1 ball/sec) to create what they call “modules” that can theoretically be linked indefinitely.
My kid was obsessed with these videos when he was 3-4, he would regularly cry out for BALL MACHINES
Here’s a common example of a huge GBC they put together at cons
Here’s the master of the craft, a Japanese dude spoken of in hushed tones by the Anglophone GBC community
during the worst of the snow a month or a ago, an engineer left marble races up on his second monitor all day straight
just marbles, competing, with mostly straight-laced commentary. Marbles have names (team Momo: Mo, Momomo, Momi), personalities? (sometimes cheaters!), get injured… and this has been running for years
Looks like there was a breakout video a few months ago that probably coincided with the engineer watching it. The fans get unruly and start a fight:
so I find this entertaining mostly because I spend my time trying to piece out the intended audience and viewing relationship,
It’s like an artist and designer reaction against engineering; where function dictates form (the monoculture of designs within ramp-bots of fast battling, with random mutations sprouting), they abandon function in favor of expression.
It’s a lovely sort of hedonism, and I mean that in its full sense, and not only as a pejorative.
I don’t know enough about Japanese culture to make any broad statements but it’s so steeped in both design and engineering that their must be interesting tensions and commentary like this all over the place. I wonder what it’s like between college degree programs.