
Micromouse - caiobegotti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromouse
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skywhopper
What I'm struck by are the parallels to problems currently being "solved" with
machine learning. Engineers can build tiny robots who can navigate a maze
dozens of times faster than a real mouse with far fewer errors and a perfect
memory!

Now, take that fact and start raising money off the claim that you can soon
replace all mice and potentially rats too with robots in the next five years.
These rodents will have no disease, require no food, produce no poop, and only
need to be rested on their inductive charging pads overnight! We know we're
close because we've solved the maze problem!

That's ridiculous of course, and maybe pet mice aren't really a good stand-in
for potentially useful technology. But the distance between these robot maze-
solvers and a real mouse is about where we are with modern machine learning
and AI. Yes, in a very narrow, extremely well-specified problem area, we have
programs that can predict the next word you're going to type or transcribe
speech or recognize a face. It works way faster and is 200x less error prone
than a human! But of course, what errors do happen are catastrophically worse
than any human would make, and if the parameters of the problem space vary in
the least then everything goes out the window. And turns out the model can be
trivially manipulated by malicious actors to churn out false positives or
amplify propaganda or promote scams.

But we're almost there, I promise.

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reza_n
See if you can spot the sub 4s route:
[https://youtu.be/IngelKjmecg](https://youtu.be/IngelKjmecg)

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ece
Nice, I imagine a BB-8-like robot could be faster.

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Lerc
I came across some youtube videos of Micromouse competitions completly by
chance a few weeks ago.

I wa struck by how impressive the engineering was to make the little things go
and corner so quickly. At the same time I noticed there was still what I would
consider low-hanging-fruit. Specifically one of the mazes had a dead-end of
depth one that most of the mice tried going down after passing it in favour of
a longer dead-end path. It strikes me that you could sense simple cases like
this as you go past them.

If I were to have a go (I have been somewhat tempted since discovering this
was a thing) I would try a sonar ping to compare against a dictionary of known
simple configurations. It's something that would be in the realms of
possibility for modern microcontrollers. Then if you pass an intersection, you
can ping them all and eliminate any known dead ends.

I did see one that raised a camera to scan the map, but it took a long time
processing the data.

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iamgopal
The goal of competition is to run in shortest time. If the goal was to find
shortest path in shortest time, this is good idea.

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ComputerGuru
And if a sub-100ms ping told you “dead end, don’t try” how does that _not_ get
you to the finish line faster?

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jotux
The mice traverse the maze, find the optimized path, then return to the start
to do the fast run from start to finish. It's not the speed of the first run,
but the overall fastest.

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PhasmaFelis
Does the exploration run not count at all, then? Are they only scored on the
speed of the optimized run?

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jstanley
Only the fastest time is counted.

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Wildgoose
I didn't know these were still going. I remember they used to be reported in
Practical Computing magazine in the later 1970s/early 1980s here in the UK.

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dbcurtis
Yes, still going. The top competitors are wicked fast. When micromouse
started, you could get an 8-bit microcontroller with a 1 MHz clock and just
squeezing all the hardware into the footprint was a challenge, and having
enough ram to represent the maze. Now you can easily make a small, fast,
32-bit ARM Cortex mouse that is small enough to take diagonal zig-zag portions
of the maze in a straight line.

The maze is painful to set up, though. Our local robot club got together and a
bunch of us each bought a kit that allows building a 5x5 maze, which is good
for training. We can construct an "official-ish" 16x16 for competitions. I've
been involved in set-up/tear-down a couple of times, and it is royally
annoying and time consuming.

A quicker maze that is much more portable, and in terms of software, a
conceptually identical software challenge (until you reach the level of
diagonal short cuts) is to use electrical tape on linoleum floor tile to build
a wall-less line-following maze. In the US, cheap lino floor tile comes in 12
inch squares. Cheap black electrical tape is 3/4 inch wide. We make a line-
following maze out of that. It is quick to set up and tear down, and provides
a good challenge for getting started in robotics. Linoleum tile is
surprisingly heavy to cart around, but it is not unwieldy. It is totally
practical to take a few minutes before a club meeting to deal out a random
maze, which no way can be said for an official micromouse maze.

[edit] found a link to our rules
[http://slideplayer.com/slide/9202003/](http://slideplayer.com/slide/9202003/)

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PhasmaFelis
Why does it take so long to set up? It seems like a pegboard (that possibly
breaks down into several parts) and a bunch of pegged wall segments would
allow one person to set up a 16x16 board in a few minutes.

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jstanley
16x16 tiles is 256 tiles. Doing 256 of anything is time-consuming, let alone
referencing a map and trying to make sure you do it right.

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PhasmaFelis
Sure, but I feel like I could place 256 Lego bricks, say, in 15 minutes or
less, and a structure like this could be made as easy to assemble as Legos.

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kylegordon
Great resource at [https://sites.google.com/site/myprojectq/robotic/classic-
mic...](https://sites.google.com/site/myprojectq/robotic/classic-micromouse)

Looks like the latest iteration will use a fan for suction power, adding to
the traction capability.

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NamTaf
Micromouse was one of the group projects for the mechatronics engineers at my
university. I’m sure their solutions weren’t state of the art sophisticated
but I enjoyed watching their trials (and failures) in between my own study.

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iamgopal
As a mechatronics engineer, I too participated in micromouse. Where are you
from ?

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NamTaf
I studied at UQ, in Austraila. I didn't do mechatronics engineering but a
number of my mates did and so I often spent time around them hearing their
complaints of how their flawless code simply didn't work for some mystical
reason.

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NTDF9
I used to participate in these competitions a decade ago.

So so so so much more fun than fixing social media likes.

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amelius
I would have expected some good emulation environments. Are there any?

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mackorone
I maintain a Micromouse simulator called "mms":
[https://www.github.com/mackorone/mms](https://www.github.com/mackorone/mms).
Whether or not it's any good is somewhat subjective, but it has some nice
features: text, colors, speed control, a language agnostic interface, etc.
Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think!

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pagnol
Hacker News at its best... awesome!

