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Comment by saosebastiao | Hacker News Reader

If you had a robot that could stow, pick, and pack any item in a warehouse, I have zero doubt you could negotiate $10B, simply for the fact that you could get Amazon, Staples, WalMart, Google, JD.com, Tesco, and AliBaba into a bidding war...and if none of them decided to pay you $10B, you could just offer your own FBA-like service for a fraction of what Amazon charges and make your own $10B.

Amazon is acting like a Pawn Shop owner taking advantage of the guy with the original Picasso by telling him that it was a common forgery. Nobody in their right mind should sign up for these contests, and it pains me to see intelligent people duped into it for "the exposure".

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If you had a robot that could stow, pick, and pack any item in a warehouse...

TFA was pretty clear that none of the teams at the competition had anything close to this. The winner, which was far ahead of competitors, was able to move ten of a group of twelve specially-selected objects in twenty minutes. It's quite possible that some of the competitors will eventually create what you're talking about, but it doesn't seem that they've given away their grandchildren's inheritance just yet.

> Nobody in their right mind should sign up for these contests, and it pains me to see intelligent people duped into it for "the exposure".

This attitude disappoints me greatly.

The team that won was the robotics research unit at the Technical University of Berlin: https://www.robotics.tu-berlin.de, second place was MIT.

I hardly think they were "duped" into competing.

These people do research. Having a specified task that multiple teams "compete" on is there just to give a good comparison of the different approaches, otherwise everyone is picking their own tasks and it's hard to see what benefits / cons each system has.

What next, complaining that researchers publish open access papers for "the exposure" rather than selling the ideas?

Edit -

Here's a list of the teams: http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/teams.shtml

I have no problem with competition nor open research, which is probably how the researchers viewed this competition. My problem was how strikingly small the reward was for custom tailoring months of their efforts and research towards helping a single company eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs and save billions of dollars. The top prize wasn't even enough budget for a lab assistant for a year! It sounds more like an evil plot from a sinister villain than it does an interesting research opportunity. If you want to do interesting research, don't let multinational companies with obvious agendas tell you what is interesting unless they are also willing to share the reward that they get from your hard work.

This presumes aquiring large quantities of money is a required motivation for developing new technology for one to be qualified as 'in their right mind'. To me this comes off like saying 'No one in their right mind should be a teacher and give knoweledge to others that they could use to get rich'.

Believe it or not some people enjoy the competition, the challenge of solving an interesting problem you had not previously considered, and over all advancing the technology of the world they live in far more than gaining absurd amounts of monetary wealth.

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