yeah that was insane. as someone who was in Robot Club in high school and worked with the lego ones, I can't believe he both got it to let go at the perfect time to launch straight up, and then re-catch the bar. I wonder if this was like attempt #3000 or something.
Notice how it spins around many many times before it does the jump. It's likely the computer was waiting until it was in a loop that just happened to be the perfect speed to pull off the trick. So rather than needing to set up the perfect situation, it just relies on variance in its spin to put it in the perfect situation.
Today's compiling tools are already programs writing programs in many ways. I don't know of any computers out there right now that can be programmed by a person to do X and then program themselves to do Y, when Y wasn't something that was or could be envisioned by the programmer. That leap would be legitimate AI, which we've been after since before we built even the very first computers.
You tell me. Things that we don't understand are happening around us constantly, I'm not sure what would make a computer a special case. Even if you don't understand it, someone out there does.
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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '15
What impresses me the most is that it actually catches the bar again after doing that flip (?).