Show HN: Impossible Machines: declaratively program the physical world

(impossiblemachines.xyz)

39 points | by bhaprayan 20 hours ago

6 comments

  • donalddominko 4 minutes ago
    This is actually very interesting idea you had. I watched the demo and played with it and I am looking for a link to repo - I would like to know how did you implement the system achieving the outcome.
  • skinfaxi 1 hour ago
    This is cool! I think it would be interesting to expand the language of the world. Right now the interaction with the bell or door is limited (basically binary). Even with binary it would be cool to say ring the bell three times or play shave and a haircut and then a mechanical device that could generate that frequency would be created (for ex a simplistic one would be to skip every other ring for ringing the bell). I guess that would require the world/the objects to account for interactions over some recording period.
    • bhaprayan 1 hour ago
      Thanks! Great idea, I hadn’t realized the interaction is binary. It would be cool to allow for "continuous" inputs too. The world would have to account for interactions over a recording period right.

      Behind the scenes, I’ve tried to make the audio production realistic, so there’s some acoustic modeling going on (eg echoes, attenuation of sound, etc). But yes you could imagine having the input forces be continuous and having the mechanism trying to figure out how to reproduce the sound exactly.

  • pshc 54 minutes ago
    The Incredible Machine vibes.
    • bhaprayan 20 minutes ago
      Embarrassed I'm just finding out about this, very cool! Neat that they simulated air pressure too. I should try that, would be fun to influence the texture of the sound.
  • mcphage 38 minutes ago
    Disney's research lab did something along these lines some years ago for making a point follow a path. You draw a path, and it generates the linkages required to match that path as closely as possible. They've had a lot of follow-up work since, but I remember this video for it: https://youtu.be/DfznnKUwywQ?si=F-5NZxKu4hP_mand
  • jdw64 1 hour ago
    It seems people think alike. Something that inspired me in the past also had a similar implementation.

    [1]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/motion-...

    • bhaprayan 1 hour ago
      That was cool! Watched the demo video, didn't go through the paper yet. I'm running a simple heuristic to test for candidate solutions and running them through Rapier (https://rapier.rs), but simulated annealing to efficiently search the configuration space would be a nice extension.
      • jdw64 1 hour ago
        Your work is wonderful, too.
        • bhaprayan 18 minutes ago
          Thanks, appreciate it!
  • hilde574 1 minute ago
    [flagged]