Guest blogged by Anuj on April 12, 2008.
I am currently waiting for a .pdf plug-in to download in order to continue working, life is so pathetic just when I had found the perfect page which had everything I was looking for, and my browser tells me that I forgot to install the plug in. I wish I owned a laptop using other somebody else’s computer is a hazard for my mental health. Anyway, I can’t complain because he just showed me one of the most insanely great things I have ever seen, see the ‘he’ in question is my father’s friend and he owns a TV factory which is partially automated and it’s a fully functional assembly line, ah, now this was fun I have spent more than 6 hours in this place walking around seeing CNC machines, I saw automatic insertion machines both radial and axial types, an insanely great wave soldering machine, which I know I can make better, and I also an EDM cutting out a mold. I even tried my hand in screwing CRTs but I underestimated the force and the pneumatic screw driver flew off into void, embarrassing.
Oh dear it’s 20 MB and it will take a while. Anyway I saw everything, tried my hand at everything and played around with everything, it was almost as if I owned the place, and uncle enjoyed having me around I had an insanely great day. Anyway I was looking at the wave soldering machine and I realized that a lot of material is wasted in the process, why don’t they take a pneumatic head put the PCBs on one of those awesome XY tables, and then mount a heated tube on the head and then solder it this way, in order to save time they could use multiple heads at one time in a specific sequence, maybe use parallel processing architecture to manage them, turns out that I was dead wrong. See it takes some amount of time about 3 seconds or so for the solder to stick and get cooled in order to form the bead, this way one or even multiple heads will take more time than the same machine to do the same task. However, as you can imagine the wave machine has lots of problems, the beads maybe too big, or sometimes two points stick together, which can short the circuit. They, thus, have to be manually checked for faults before the final assembly. So my idea can trade off that time for a little more time in the soldering process, but then again, there are feasibility problems.
Someday, I will make it and see if it works, or I will find someone who has and then see his/her work. The next thing I noticed was the cooling facility for the water they use as a coolant. I think that it’s inefficient what they can do is that they can immerse Freon pipes in the tank and circulate it around, thus cooling the water. This will take lesser amount of time, so water consumption can be reduced, maybe there’s a commercial solution out there that does exactly this; if anyone knows, then please leave a message.
I think that one of the most amazing things I saw today was the automatic insertion machines (there are two kinds radial and axial, the radial machine puts in the vertical components like capacitors and the axial one puts in the horizontal ones like resistors), see what I loved about the process was the precision involved, a mistake of a few millimeters is very costly. What it essentially does is that it puts in the components into PCBs, in a few seconds. They have an XY table which moves the PCB, a pneumatic head that has this nifty crankshaft mechanism, and a cutter at the bottom. The parts are feed in on a tape and, boom! the head goes down slices the leads and puts them into the exact co-ordinate they are supposed to be in, then immediately the other head at the bottom comes up and cuts the out the excess lead sticking out of the bottom; it’s like magic. What I didn’t like was that the fact that programming it is a very, very arduous task, one has to specify co-ordinate after co-ordinate, which are measured before hand, into the machine in a specific sequence so that it matches with the part on the tape. What they can do is that they can make a scanner which scans a PCB and makes a computer representation of the PCB, no that won’t do what we need is perhaps an ANN (artificial neural network) which over time learns where the errors are and avoids those tasks which cause the errors, and maybe find a better way. That’s highly unlikely but I would love to understand their software and the algorithms they use.
I also liked the electrical discharge machine, see what you have is a copper master, which is pushed down on the block, along with electrical discharge while kerosene, a dielectric material, flows over it or it’s in a kerosene bath. The metal erodes away and the master is pushed further and further down, just imagine the precision and the almost impossible cuts that can be achieved. It’s seriously an insanely great product. Imagine the die was so precisely cut, it was a very, very impressive sight, sure it takes a few hours but it does almost impossible cuts. I mean it was awesome no it was really insanely great, not to mention impressive. I am seriously on cloud number 9 right now, I can live here, and I would love to do that.
In short, it was like a trip to Disney land and I am coming back on Monday!! Oh no, the download was interrupted, so I am starting it again, maybe I’ll make something like the insertion machine out of Lego, hmm that’s a good idea, but how…
One more thing, it’s the anniversary of Gagarin’s space flight today, have fun celebrating Yuri’s night!!
Poyeholi!
Computer program deduces laws of physics – on its own
April 8th, 2009
Food For Thought, Google-y, H.A.L., Stop The Press, Tech Takes, Yahoo-niverse
This is what you call an exciting development. A new computer program developed by researchers at Cornell University has accomplished an astonishing feat – deducing laws of physics using nothing but simple mathematical analysis of large data sets. No, it didn’t discover anything path-breaking but this is a huge step forward nevertheless.
What the program had to work with was just a few basic mathematical operators. The program was designed to look for relations between different parts of the dataset fed to it and distill equations from it. The dataset fed involved ones from simple pendulums and spring oscillators. Using this, the program spit out equations – Newton’s Second Law, and the law of conservation of momentum. All that in just one day! Here’s how Wired described in a nutshell the concept behind the software:
Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems.
(Also read the Science magazine extract for the research by Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson)
To be fair to previous researchers in the field, we can say that it is only now that we have access to cheap, plentiful storage and processing power that such a thing could be possible. Even with such serious number-crunching power it did take considerable time for the come up with ‘easy’ laws. Security researchers have already harnessed the power of farms of PlayStation 3 consoles to carry out brute force attacks to break SSL. The point to note here is that this kind of power is finally something which is attainable within a reasonable budget. Progressing to a stage where it can actually dazzle us with a new discovery may be quite a daunting task given the amount of processing it would take. Still, this particular iteration of the software was more ‘proof-of-concept’ rather than a production model – a demonstration that it could be done. Equipped with more complex ‘building blocks’ of mathematical operators might allow it to achieve results faster.
photo credit: Home BissAnother recent development in a somewhat similar field is that of the search engine Wolfram Alpha. Currently not publicly accessible, but certain media outlets were given a preview of Wolfram Alpha. According to whatever the reviewers have been allowed to speak it would seem that Wolfram has gone where Powerset hasn’t. Wolfram actually generates fact-sheets regarding a user’s search query – albeit limited to only certain topics at the moment – in contrast to Powerset which simply returns existing data. Present-generation search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are nowhere going out of the picture any time soon unless per web-page indexing costs (comparatively high for Powerset) goes down. Let’s not consider processing cost a trivial factor. Although it was a dud, one of the major ‘advantages’ that the promoters of Cuil touted was that their system could index much more data than Google with lower expenditure on processing costs. Eventually Cuil’s ranking algorithm was written off by reviewers as flawed (maybe because it showed “random pornography” – NSFW!)
photo credit: ! Franz Maga !
That brings us to the larger ideal of the Semantic Web – a vision where computer can understand what currently human-readable data means. The top two search engine providers are going different ways on this. Google is trying to use large-scale data analysis to find patterns – basically, NLP on a scale never tried before; they are well-prepared for this too as they own one of the largest indexes of information in the world. Yahoo! Search, on the other hand, is rooting for microformats. Microformats use existing XHTML markup standards to ‘mark’ as to what the data tagged means. Does require effort on part of the publisher, but given the craze around search engine optimization I’m sure this will take of quickly if the Google monolith throws in the towel and decides to support microformats. You see, although Google’s ideals of using unbiased machine-analysis et al is sci-fi and ‘futuristic’, it is also too rosy and impractical – for now. Powerset succeeded because it stuck to analysing Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha is aimed at providing answers (right now) to known scientific facts. In both cases, we find that this was possible due to the availability of structured data. With microformats, descriptions can easily be added without resorting to OWL.
photo credit: ~inkyThe ‘fun’ thing about computer science as a field is that it is not limited by physical laws in a major way. True, Moore’s Law has been validated every single milestone with faster and / or cheaper processing power becoming available. (Equally important is cheap storage – can you even think of analysing the terabytes and petabytes of data without current storage solutions?) In this case it is true that hardware limitations have stemmed reasonable attempts at quests such as these – until now. Software truly is virtual reality. There is no limit to how fast a computer language and its capabilities can mutate with successive generations. There’s a limit to the efficiency of an internal combustion engine. Forget practical figures of maximum efficiency hovering around 25%; there are theoretical limits dictated by thermodynamics. There are limits to how tall you can make a building – limits imposed by construction material. Computers, on the other hand, will see processing power increasing manifold over the next few years. Will humankind innovate quickly enough to keep in step with this raw power and unlock new secrets? Time will tell, but it certainly is an interesting and exciting challenge for those stepping into this field.
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