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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

Very cool.

Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of rocks and tell me how to put them together to build a wall with minimal space between them.

https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/stone-wall-texture-pict...

Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

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Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often:

Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of socks and tell me how to put them together to have a perfect match.

https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/socks-pile-texture-pict...

Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

Sock matching is not really difficult is it? The act of putting them together is the cumbersome part!

Depends on the person. Some are naturally good at playing Candy Crush and might even enjoy it. I'm terrible at it and for me it's borderline torture.

Same with sorting socks.

This is an easy problem to solve, find the socks you like and then buy 20 pairs of the same socks and get rid of the old ones.

This works remarkably well in that you might think you'd end up throwing away a lot of good socks, but in my experience socks are surprisingly prone to either design flaws that sees many socks from the same batches wear out in the same way around the same time and/or similar wear from your footwear etc., so when they start going odds are you'll see a series of rapid failures, and you're not losing much by replacing them all when you're left with few enough.

Not so fast. Sock magic: I've only bought black socks over the last 5 year, and still I can't seem to find ones anymore that exactly match in both fitting and color (they all seem to have degraded in different color tones)

Maybe your left foot produces slightly more agressive sweat than the right one.

This only really tracks if they intentionally wear socks on specific feet. While some socks have L/R indicators, most don't.

Ah, the trick here is to buy all your socks at the same time, and open all the packs at once. Don't just open a pack every now and then, or they'll age differently and you get the variation in wear and tear. Then once you're down to a few days' worth of raggedy socks, throw them all out at once and open the next batch.

(Source: Am a fellow black-sock-only person who made the above mistake last time around.)

My trick is to have only white socks and to not actually care if they're matching levels of tired.

This requires sock drawer/shelf management. Socks will form a FOFI stack where clean pairs will be taken from the top, worn, washed and returned to the top of the stack while other clean pairs sit beneath without being touched. Those at the top of the stack will wear out faster.

Mitigation might include not washing any socks until all clean pairs are exhausted, but this may result in a smelly linen bin. Alternatives might be keeping clean socks in a pair of tights with the toes cut out - most recently cleaned in the top pushing down, fresh pairs taken from the open toe; hang this up for a better UX.

For my drawers I stack horizontal, old on the left and new fresh washed come in on the right. So you can see what you’ve been wearing and what you haven’t worn for a while and choose accordingly. Works for shirts, socks, underwear, etc.

As far as I'm concerned, the point of a sock monoculture is never to think about matching: as soon as a sock requires any special attention, I simply throw it out.

I only have black ones and a couple of white ones for sports. The white ones are fine, but the black socks get significantly brighter over time. Now sorting almost matching socks is much harder than when I had a hodgepodge. Admittedly I mostly ignore the differences in shade but it doesn't sit well with me.

A sock sorter would be perfect.

Im in a military. I get issued 15 pairs of socks each year in three different styles. But from one year to the next, pairs are never constructed exactly the same. Then the wear/washing history of each pair divides them even within a given year's issue. I have 43 pairs of socks now in my "work socks" drawer (just counted) but no two are interchangeable. When they come out of the drier i still have to individually match them. Interchangable parts tech has yet to crack this field.

Ha I have the same problem. Even the exact same sock won’t match dye colors. Sometimes it’s brighter or darker colors.

Turns out you already have a pair of any combination of socks.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often:

Now what I want is something that will scan a pile of stocks and tell me how to put them together to have a perfect portfolio.

https://www.tradingview.com/heatmap/stock/

Or better yet, tell my robot how to do it.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often: Now what I want is something that will scan dating sites for my perfect mate.

Or better yet, tell my robot how to do her.

If your robot is doing her robot, you can let the algorithms do the perfect mate matching, and then just grab a relaxed coffee with her, no sexual pressure anymore. What Žižek would call a great date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xYO-VMZUGo

What meme is this from?

Very cool idea, but what I'd need more often is something that will take a pile of memes and put them together into a perfect post.

Very cool idea, but what I'd need way more often:

Now what I want is something that will scan my life and tell me how to put it back together properly.

Or better yet, provide a robot to do it for me.

There's lots of papers about that algorithm used on warehouse box stocking.

More generalised, the act of putting them together is a subset of bin packing, which is certainly one of the more studied problems of computer science, though NP-hard, and having a pile of rocks of different size complicates things substantially. Getting a decent approximation once you know the dimensions of the rocks is probably doable, but minimising the labour necessary to get the scans you need of each rock is also a huge challenge.

That is a problem in three dimensions, a Photo wont tell you the 3d shape of each rock.

Of course. But I didn't say a photo. (it could be video, it could be lidar, etc) And yeah maybe you need the robot to pick up each rock and look at it from different angles.

My source is that I once leafed through a Japanese in a book store book for rural diy homesteader types that had detailed instructions on how to make a retaining wall for terraced rice fields not dissimilar to the one you pictured, and my impression is that there is a lot of engineering behind the surface, and also the arrangement of the sizes of the stones to make it stable and movement resistant (like to settle back into place after a quake), that make this more than just fitting the shapes together like a jigsaw.. I wish i had actually bought that book now.

Yes it is a challenging problem to do it well. But cool to think about!

Maybe take a normal rock wall and break it into tiny pieces, then reassemble.

This could actually be stronger than a wall built from rectangular pieces.

I've been curious to see what a stable diffusion type thing trained on blueprints and schematics could produce.

The magnum opus of such a project would be something that could produce the circuit from the text "a guitar pedal that makes a guitar sound like wet blankets and dry pickles in the washing machine."

The extension of your idea would be a piece of software that could generate the BoM and gcode to assemble the circuit, or in your instance the bricks.

The meta of that would be the circuit that could build circuits that build circuits.

A peasant will do that wall better, and (more importantly) for cheaper. I know because I'm a peasant.

There's one for bananas on bread.

https://www.ethanrosenthal.com/2020/08/25/optimal-peanut-but...

Build bridges, not walls

Good fences make good neighbors.

Dry-stone walling is a skill!

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