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Spinnerproof
By Sam Hutchins and Ryan BratleyTechnology
Spinnerproof episodes
- 61: Fluffy Ones That Don't Hurt Each Other
- Front matter
- We already recorded this.
- Battle in the ‘Burgh
- The whole tournament on YouTube
- Plus whiteboards and shenanigens
- How to watch a live event
- ‘Fixing’ the Battlebots meta
- Spinners bad
- Weight bonuses for non-spinners?
- Are weight bonuses effective?
- How do you decide how much is enough?
- Walker/shuffler bonuses
- Shuffler bonus for UK Beetles dropped from 50% to 33% in June 2019
- Battlebots used to acknowledge that unsticks happen
- SOW went 7-0 as a Heavyweight shuffler, and 2-4 as a Superheavyweight
- Removing Battlebots’ extra barriers to non-spinner success
- Arena hazards
- Less intrusive pit designs:
- Robot Ruckus’ walled-off corner pit
- The ‘side pocket’
- Judging criteria
- Robogames judging (ctrl+f ‘flip over’ to find relevant section)
- Say what you want about Robogames, this is a pretty good set of judging rules
- A general discussion about AI and Machine Learning
- A conversation driven by the sordid tale of Apple’s ‘sexist’ credit card
- Defining AI, Machine Learning, and AGI (for the purposes of this discussion)
- AI: A decision-making system designed by a human. Can be debugged.
- Machine Learning: A system which produces a decision-making system. Built and then trained, can’t really be debugged.
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): Sci-fi version of AI which is, or appears to be, a human-level intelligence. Don’t worry about it. Yet.
- Current uses of AI/ML
- Image/video processing
- Google’s image compression
- YouTube’s video compression
- Social media
- How it all works
- The wonderful, wholesome, entirely benevolent Netflix algorithm
- Sam’s experiences with Reddit
- Promoting controversy/outrage
- Bad technology vs technology being used by bad people
- Setting ‘goals’ for ML systems
- Finance (and other stuff)
- How bias can develop within an ML system
- The Apple case
- How bias is picked up
- Why bias might not be detected
- Medicine
- Cancer detection
- What happens when the machine causes a human death?
- The impact of one life lost vs x lives saved
- Potential bad implementations of the technology
- Crime ‘prevention’
- Predicting reoffending
- Opportunities for bias presented by data which would likely be used for training
- How to be better
1 hr 55 min - 60: Disregard the Physical
- Follow Up
- Battlebots Bingo
- It’s over, but its also not over
- Potential future ticks
- Khajit has wares: does Monsoon using a piece of Bombshell count?
- Elephantastic: Nelly still has a fight to be released
- Thrilling statistical analysis
- 9 of Roasting Robots’ 16 predictions scored points
- 4 of these went to Robocast, 3 to Spinnerproof, and 2 back to RR
- 8 of Robocast’s 16 predictions scored points
- 5 of these went to RR, 2 to Spinnerproof, and 1 back to Robocast
- 5 of Spinnerproof’s 16 predictions scored points
- 3 of these went back to Spinnerproof, while RR and Robocast each received 1
- Front Matter
- FRA Beetleweight Champs
- Event recap/report thing
- This video’s thumbnail is possibly one of my favourite things I’ve ever made and that genuinely scares me - Ryan
- Playlist of our fights
- Full event video
- Battlebots
- The robots we missed
- Bloodsport
- Unfortunate to come up against 2 verts in its play-in
- Skorpios
- Suffering from its similarity to Sawblaze: a robot which Battlebots has definitely fallen in love with
- Matched up against a lot of tanky machines
- Most of the original team from 2016 are still on the team, but the team has doubled in size since 2016
- The captaincy has changed, but the previous captain (Orion Beach) is still on the team
- Sidewinder
- The weird idea which kinda worked, right up until it didn’t
- Tantrum
- Not-Tantrum working extremely well in China
- The additional brutality of a spinner you have to fire
- Battleboats
- Battlebots, but on water
- The meme which didn’t actually spark this conversation
- Model warship combat
- Projectile weapons on replica boats
- Wetbots at RoboNerd
- Normal robot combat weapons on…whatever you would call that
- What weapons can be effective?
- Multiple weapons?
- Submarines? Hovercrafts? Hydrofoils? Ekranoplans? Crabs?
- Weapon restrictions
- Mythbusters on how bubbles affect buoyancy
- Bubbles sinking a ship
- ‘Arena’ hazards
- Robot naming conventions
- Semantic Versioning
- Year-based versioning
- What if an event takes place over the new year?
- Aftershow: Roborace
- Tom Scott’s video
- The project has been going for at least 3 years but good info seems hard to find
- 2019 was the first time they brought in external teams to turn this into a competitive sporting environment
- How ‘deeply’ can teams alter the car’s software?
- No active overtaking in races, overtakes are limited to straights and uncontested
- How programmers make software work better
- Fast inverse square root
- RAM management on PS1
- (Not mentioned in the podcast, but still interesting): Game Saving
- Writing an operating system
1 hr 41 min - 59: ooOoOOHH
- Battlebots Bingo
- Welcome to a world where the shownotes don’t really exist!
- Instead, all the key info can be found here
- The final cards
- Roasting Robots
- Reunited: Monsoon & Ragnarok will face Mad Catter & Chronos in Episode 16’s Bonus fight
- Elephantastic: Nelly had another fight (vs Shellshock)
- Nelly’s ridiculous hammer power
- Split Personality: Tom Brewster agrees that Monsoon was split ‘in half’
- Mike predicted he would get 6-8 - good job, Mike!
- Robocast
- Khajit has Wares: was there a behind the scenes segment showing Bloodsport borrowing the self-righting pole?
- Spinnerproof Sam offered £5/$5 for anybody who got a full house
- Fight Court Reboot: The live audience when there’s a ‘controversial’ JD
- Ryan doesn’t know the difference betwene Wan Hoo and Railgun Max
- Back Asswards: Episode 12, fight 2 (SOW vs Kraken): “Kraken jams up that spinner!”
- Spinnerproof
- Apologies to Craig Danby: this may be revisited when a Foxtrot basement fight comes out
- A New Hero Rises: 64/66 is 96.969696969%
- Nice.
- Breaking the tie
- WE WIN!
- Or nobody wins?
- BONUS STATS
- Who gave the kindest predictions?
- 9 of Roasting Robots’ 16 predictions scored points
- 4 of these went to Robocast, 3 to Spinnerproof, and 2 back to RR
- 8 of Robocast’s 16 predictions scored points
- 5 of these went to RR, 2 to Spinnerproof, and 1 back to Robocast
- 5 of Spinnerproof’s 16 predictions scored points
- 3 of these went back to Spinnerproof, while RR and Robocast each received 1
- That’s all the stats. I’m sorry that the heading set an unreasonable expectation.
1 hr 9 min - 58: Infected Me with Elon
- Front matter
- Ryan sees Teslas in the wild
- Battlebots
- Episode 15
- Sawblaze vs SOW
- Being unreasonably drawn away from SOW
- Sawblaze’s reluctance to use the weapon
- MegatRON
- “Hammer Saw”
- Two guys who have never built a spinner make wild guesses about how you build a spinner
- The late hit
- Such late. Many unsporting.
- DeathRoll vs Yeti
- Big weapons, big aggression
- Yeti self-righting?
- DeathRoll’s lack of spares
- Preventative maintenance
- Quantum vs Tombstone
- Ray’s box-rush bamboozle
- 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399
- That’s 46 perfectly recalled digits of pi
- The world record is 67,890. Git gud, scrub
- And they may not have even included the 3
- Relevant XCKD
- HUGE vs Whiplash
- HUGE: the sports model
- Bob Lazar approved
- A tricky/easy JD
- HUGE gets the damage points, even if what feels like 3 points worth of damage hasn’t been done in the fight overall
- HUGE, by virtue of being the style of robot it is, may struggle to demonstrate aggression and control despite being aggressive and controlled
- Live event judging systems
- No judging system?
- It turns out the diving judges are following a complex and rigid system, who knew?
- Semi-anonymous judging?
- Episode 16
- Witch Doctor vs Deathroll
- Return of the Judges’ Decision
- Separating judging from refereeing
- Controlled Translational movement
- Hello There! limping on with one side of drive dead
- “Quick Walking”
- The JD itself
- Spoilery trailer shenanigens
- Tombstone vs Biteforce
- A spectacle, but not the spectacle we expected
- Biteforce pulls through with little-to-no damage
- Biteforce vs Witch Doctor
- The weird human need for variety and novelty
- How do you challenge Biteforce?
- Yes, we know it may not be coming back in its current form. Humour us
1 hr 25 min - 57: 'H' Quota
- Follow up
- The Judges’ Guide has been published!
- Check out exactly how badly Ryan explained many, many things
- Front matter
- FRA Beetleweight Champs
- We’ve been accepted
- We’re trying a few new things inside Hello There!
- Competetive Ryan?
- Battlebots
- Episode 13
- Free Shipping vs Railgun Max
- “Eggbeater drum”
- The Great Damage Debate pt.2
- When does damage to a robot ≠damage done by the opponent?
- Sam and Ryan agree that the current application of the judging rules is unfairly biased against spinners
- Lack of resolution in the scoring
- Protecting the judges
- A correct decision can still lead to the ‘wrong’ robot winning
- Bronco vs Hydra
- Bronco is better than 0-4
- Tough matchups and a weird defeat
- Bronco’s history against verts isn’t as bad as it may seem
- Wins vs ’lesser’ verts: S1 Witch Doctor, Razorback, S3 Bombshell, a semi-functional Lockjaw, and WAR Hawk
- Defeats to tougher verts: Minotaur, Whiplash, Biteforce, HUGE, re:MARS Witch Doctor.
- Inertia Labs’ trademark style
- BrONcO hAS To gO HydrAUlIc nOW!
- Episode 14
- A set of questionable matchups
- And questionable selections
- Valkyrie vs Quantum
- Valkyrie’s mysterious 4th fight
- Every crusher is a control bot
- The Quantum/Spectre wedge
- Hypershock vs HUGE
- Rake: legitimate competitive addition or pure meme?
- The can be no middle ground
- HUGE’s excellent wheel design
- RotatoR vs Blacksmith
- Waiting for the count vs scoring more points
- The Great Damage Debate pt.3
- Cobalt vs Minotaur
- No wedge = no hope?
- Cobalt’s ridiculously durable weapon
- An uncontentious JD?
- Round of 16 seedings and matchups
- They’re a tad strange
- Why is Deathroll so low?
- Why is Tombstone so high?
- Why is HUGE so low?
- Last season’s Desperado winner (Lockjaw) got 9th, not 8th
- How much of this discussion is a result of confirmation bias? Probably more than we want it to be.
1 hr 36 min - 56: Use Once Clutch
- Front Matter
- Robonerd 2019
- We went
- We recorded basically nothing
- Sam was horrifically injured
- Hello There!, Split Decision, and Tropical Storm Phil v0.3 all fighting
- Hello There! dominating participating in the ‘Content Creators’ Rumble
- We have no new footage of Split Decision so here’s a Gabriel fight
- TSP’s noble death
- Battlebots 2019
- Episode 11
- Live commentary track
- Spinnerproof Bonus feed
- DUCK! vs Quantum
- Sam was right
- Ryan was biased
- DUCK!’s lack of KO potential
- Old weapon vs new weapon
- Lack of non-invertible robots
- Ryan counts six competitors which aren’t invertible and have no way to self right:
- Captain Shredderator, Daisycutter, Deep Six, Kingpin, Shellshock, SOW,
- Plus four with questionable self righting ability/invertibility
- Cobalt, End Game, Bombshell, Mammoth
- DUCK!’s lack of being-KO’d potential
- Blacksmith vs Captain Shrederator
- Ryan is unintentionally meaner than he means to be
- Sam was right
- Modifications/configurations
- Blacksmith’s wedge
- Shrederator’s fally-offy teeth
- Shrederator’s sticky-uppy teeth
- A lengthy debate about how to judge damage to a spinner
- If a butterfly flaps its wings and Shrederator’s weapon stops working, does Blacksmith get the damage points?
- A robot being damaged != damage points for the opponent
- Tombstone vs Gruff
- A very lengthy (~20 minute) debate monologue about how to judge the aggression of a spinner (and the definition of aggression)
- Clarification re: ‘severity’ - the 3 judging categories are supposed to be totally separate, so the term ‘forcefulness’ being used is surprising and confusing since force should equate to damage
- For this reason, it makes more sense (to Ryan) for the term ‘forcefulness’, in this context, to refer to how the attack is carried out rather than its effect
- By this definition, it makes sense to think of ‘severity’ in terms of whether an attack could have been carried out MORE forcefully
- Clarification re: ‘boldness’ - Ryan latched onto a single phrase a little too hard here: risking damage to a weapon by using it is considered more bold than an attack with something else (eg a wedge) which is less likely to be damaged.
- This feels like it crosses over weirdly with the later clause about not using a weapon. Its ‘double damage’ against wedges, and that sucks.
- A less lengthy discussion about how to judge superficial damage
- A lengthy debate about how to judge damage to a spinner
- End Game vs Cobalt
- A welcome reminder of End Game’s power
- Plowless Wedgeless Cobalt
- Cobalt’s disappointing record?
- Episode 12
- The sports equivalent of a bottle episode?
- Short, one sides fights and lengthy, unsatisfying cripple fights
- Fluffy button-pressing montage
- Highlighted fights
- Double Jeopardy’s ‘miss’ on Lucky
- Shatter! vs Minotaur
- We love Shatter!
- We always talk about Shatter!
- Designs which could benefit from omnidirectional drive
- Horizontal spinner: Sluggo
- Wedge: Alcoholic Stepfather
- How did Shatter! die?
- Witch Doctor vs Gigabyte
- A little bit more than ‘one big hit’
- Dodgy physics alert
- Bronco vs HUGE
- TYRES!!
- Bronco’s top armour choice
- Defensive driving
- Bronco’s reputation and the team’s status
- Sam’s point makes complete sense
- Looking ahead to the top 16
- Everybody with 3 or more wins is likely in - even Minotaur
- Potential for episode 14 to feature 2-2 teams fighting for the last place/places
1 hr 49 min - 55: Pistol Grip Hipster
- Front Matter
- Sam complains about technology
- Wacom Intuos Art (small)
- YouTube sucks
- Many (hundreds?) of robot combat videos removed on the grounds that they showcased animal cruelty
- Most videos have now been reinstated, or at least those from uploaders who are still active
- Sam’s wider fears about the increasingly widespread application of machine learning
- RoboNerd 2019
- 31st August 2019
- Spinnerproof will be there in some capacity
- Hello There!!
- Split Decision!
- Tropical Storm Phil?
- Robot Champions
- Demo available on Steam
- Kickstarter recently launched (1/3 funded at time of writing)
- Re:MARS live event videos now on YouTube
- Terrible sound
- Distracting editing
- Awful titles
- Battlebots 2019
- Episode 9
- HUGE vs Gigabyte
- HUGE’s configurability
- Wheels, bars, spin direction
- Gigabyte’s singular gameplan
- Spin and drive
- HUGE’s love of a JD
- A lack of KO potential or a function of their matchups?
- Witch Doctor was, at the time of this fight, 7-7 - going 8-7 by beating Whiplash
- The BB website lists them as 8-5, implying that they don’t count the 2 defeats in exhibitions as true defeats, but still lists their 2016 exhibitions in its match history. 2015 fights aren’t on the match history at all, but are still counted in the stats. Basically, the BB website isn’t the authoritative source Ryan wants it to be.
- SubZero vs P1
- P1 vs SideWinder
- “Reverse flipper”
- The challenges of building a front hinge
- SubZero’s huge repair job
- SubZero’s take on the typical US flipper design
- Deep Six vs Nelly the Ellybot
- Exceptionally long necks
- Deep Six’s funky controls
- Broken everything
- Double KO = TKO
- The BB website lists both Deep Six’s win over Nelly and Quantum’s win over Blacksmith as JDs. Boo.
- Sub-standard slow-mo
- Whiplash vs Witch Doctor
- Witch Doctor developing a record befitting its reputation
- Wheels: they’re very important
- What is Whiplash’s primary weapon?
- Controlling Whiplash solo
- Controlling robots in general
- Episode X
- A slightly weird episode?
- Free Shipping vs Bronco
- Defending Bronco
- Losing to the reigning champ
- Suffering a freak failure and performing well anyway
- The Free Shipping flamethrower
- Sound effects
- Quantity of flame
- Valkyrie vs Monsoon
- The weapon which will never ever fall off again
- The weapon which will constantly hit an opponent for 3 solid minutes
- How many times will Ryan say the words “wailed on for 3 minutes”?
- Biteforce vs Hypershock
- Building Hypershock up
- Biteforce’s inability to lose the ground-clearance battle
- The concerning reality that this is what constitutes a tough season for Paul
2 hr 1 min - 54: Definitive TV
- Front matter
- Pop music corrupts children
- Introducing children to combat robotics
- Don’t tell Bugglebots!
- Spinnerproof blocked in schools
- Sam and Ryan lament how long it takes to make Spinnerproof
- It’s deceptively time consuming making a podcast
- What’s our schedule?
- Battlebots Episodes 6 and 7 (and 8)
- Gruff vs Copperhead
- TV shows bend reality to their will
- Robert Cowan’s fight recap
- Defining flamethrowers
- Shooting rifles left handed
- Monsoon vs Hypershock
- Short fights
- What makes a fight worth talking about?
- Ryan’s lack of research shows
- Tapping out
- Bronco vs Biteforce
- Will Bronco be found out?
- Other flippers in combat robotics
- Sam finally gets annoyed by the sound effects
- Sam and Ryan continue to complain about the runtime
- What is a TV show?
- Sawblaze vs Blacksmith
- Is Blacksmith boring?
- What makes a good fight?
- More analysis of judge’s decisions
- Rotator vs Tombstone
- How do you defeat Tombstone? With a wedge!
- Rotator out-wedge’s Duck!
- Dull endings to exciting fights
- A brief run-through of the desperado
- We had a nightmare recording this episode. At this point we’re 3 hours into the session, and we just ran out of time to do it justice
- Mineotaur on form
- Great final fight
- We enjoyed the desperado, even though we knew it was happening
1 hr 16 min - 53: Blow the Bias Bugle
- Follow up
- Judging
- We have had a look at the Judges’ Guide
- We can’t show you it
- We won’t quote directly from it
- We will give you the headlines
- It’s a thorough document which accounts for pretty much every reasonable scenario
- Mordecai14’s full RTNCTI run through
- The weird, weird world of gyroscopic effect
- DolphinWithRobotArms, Derekdudge, and gr_zero explain why we were Ryan was wrong
- Demonstration involving counter-rotating masses
- It was while writing these very shownotes that Ryan realised that the setup in this video is pretty much exactly what Falcon has.
- Counter Revolution demonstrating sluggish, but seemingly unhindered, turning
- ‘Mental models’ and learning: assimilation & accommodation
- Cognitive disequilibrium
- Battlebots Bingo - Update number 1
- The Bingo hub
- Front Matter
- Ben Eater building a graphics card
- Probably not a cannibal
- Definitely a clever dude
- Battlebots 2019, Episode 4
- Duck! vs Cobalt
- !Floor
- Expectations vs reality
- Impact on fights
- Impact on designs
- Design flaws, design risks, and design advantages
- Good fights > bad fights
- Duck! is amazing. Cobalt is amazing. This fight is amazing.
- ‘Cheap’ wins
- Bombshell vs RotatoR
- RotatoR’s new configuration
- RotatoR’s new, new configuartion
- Bombshell mk 3 - design vs performance
- Good robots, bad robots, and everything in between
- Team history vs robot history
- Nelly the Ellybot vs Rainbow
- BIAS!!!!!
- A fight which looked good on the card, and turned out to be a good battle
- Chris & Kenny’s performances this season
- Nelly’s working weapon
- Its OK, because its only a joke robot /s
- End Game vs Ribbot
- End Game’s smart upgrades
- End Game’s poor performances
- Ribbot’s solid design choices
- Ribbot’s solid performances
- Tombstone vs SawBlaze
- Who do they throw at Tombstone next?
- The mirror-universe version of this fight where SawBlaze doesn’t trip over its own pulveriser
- Battlebots 2019, Episode 5
- Gigabyte vs Minotaur
- Another problematic redesign
- Wheely-ing
- Weapon spinup/reliability
- D E S P E R A D O T O U R N A M E N T
- Shatter! vs WanHoo
- Yes.
- HAmMeRs dON’t dO aNY DaMAge
- Terrorhurtz “vs” Panic Attack
- The most one-sided decision of all time?
- Counting swings/hits
- Aiming to entertain
- SOW vs Whiplash
- Build up
- Podcasters discuss filmmaking…again…
- How to beat SOW
1 hr 53 min - 52: Plasticology
- Follow up
- Battlebots 2019 coverage:
- We won’t be talking about every single fight
- We feel our strength is talking about robots, not talking about fights
- We would rather focus only on the best fights than talk unenthusiastically about the less interesting ones
- We will make sure we talk about every robot over the course of the season - most of them multiple times.
- Front matter
- Captain Shrederator vs Cobalt
- Telling people to chill ~2 weeks after everyone stopped being angry
- There’s usually a reasonable background to this kind of story
- Fight Night isn’t purely a Legitimate Sporting Competition
- It’s about maximising entertainment while maintaining a valid competitive format
- How do teams use social media effectively?
- Is there a ‘right’ way to talk about this kind of behind the scenes info?
- Bad situation - great memes
- Battlebots Season 4, Episode 2
- Battlebots 2019, Episode 2
- SOW vs HUGE
- Wheels
- How much difference did they make?
- +Defence, -Speed
- Tyres - helpful?
- Pretending we know precisely how the wheels failed
- SOW’s hammers vs an ‘ordinary’ bar
- Reversing the weapon
- Fairly serious damage to SOW
- How efficiently can HUGE’s bar usually hit?
- SCARY PHYSICS - ABORT! ABORT!
- Texas Twister vs Black Dragon
- Nobody was robbed
- It’s not as simple as ‘who do you think won’ - there are points being given out.
- If you don’t like the result, your issue is with the rules and not the judges.
- Does the show make this clear enough?
- Sam and Ryan roleplay as judges for 18 minutes
- The full judging criteria
- Since recording, it’s been confirmed in multiple places that points can be split in all categories
- Damage:
- Sam: TT 2-1 BD
- Ryan: TT 2-1 BD
- Aggression
- Attacks not using a weapon are still worth something, its just less than attacks with a weapon. How much less? Good question
- Sam: TT 1-1 BD
- Ryan: TT 2-0 BD - but 1-1 feels very valid
- Control
- Sam: TT 1-1 BD
- Ryan: TT 0-2 BD - but 1-1 feels very valid
- Witch Doctor vs Shatter!
- Shatter!’s weapon issues
- Good driving all round
- Trying to work out how good Witch Doctor is: episode N
- Going into the fight, Witch Doctor had 5 wins and 7 losses
- This win and the 2 Vegas wins bring them to 8-7
- Their wins (pre-Vegas) were largely unimpressive, but their losses were all really tough fights
- Season 1: Witch Doctor vs Tombstone
- The magic of TV
- Shatter!’s crazy levels of armour
- Axe Backwards vs Mammoth
- Mammoth works
- Sam didn’t think it would
- Tweel
- Battlebots 2019, Episode 3
- Bloodsport vs Lucky
- TL:DL - we are visionaries, and any team who wants to avoid this kind of issue should invite us to join them next season
- We really made this bit confusing: During the build of Hello There! we tried to test the robot with a drive setup very similar to what Lucky used for this fight. It was horrible. Don’t do it.
- Here’s a video
- Free Shipping vs Hydra
- Making assumptions about how Hydra’s weapon works
- Since recording, the team have clarified how Hydra works
- Rollercoaster launches (Hydraulic @2:25)
- Bad washing machine science
- The potential pros and cons of Hydraulics
- Unexpected format chat
- Length and pacing
- Do the gaps between fights create more backlash when a fight isn’t good?
- Sound effects
- Breaker Box vs Falcon
- Trying to explain Falcon’s relationship with gyroscopic effect
- Trying to explain why 2WD turns faster than 4WD
- How effective is Breaker Box’s lifter?
- RoboGames 2012
- RoboGames 2011
- Biteforce vs Yeti
- A genuinely decent main event
- Unsticks Confirmed by Paul
- Forks vs wedgelets
- The universe won’t allow anything to go under Biteforce
1 hr 53 min
About Spinnerproof
From the publisher's feed
Spinnerproof is a podcast about combat robotics