tl;dw: it reduces the moving parts from thousands to just a hundred, means that the relatively untrained staff can untangle a few pins every night, and not get crushed to death.
Apparently, bowling machines crushing people to death is not as uncommon as we might want it, and therefore, the industry was due for an upgrade.
Anecdotal: I went bowling last week, and my local bowling alley has switched over to this system (Denmark). It wasn’t terrible. I had much more of an issue with the state of the oil pattern than the pins or the pin setter. Our 3 lanes didn’t jam in 2 hours.
A friend of mine told me once about working at his family's bowling alley after school one night and suddenly having his shirt ripped off him by one of the setting machines. He said it was sobering and he felt lucky he didn't go with it.
This feels so weird. The machines don't need to put that much force into the usual operation. We know how much the arm/scoop weights and the usual resistance the pins can give... So why would there be instances of people being crushed? We've got mechanical ways to restrict the force - what are the issues preventing adding that to the design?
There's elevators, gears, levers, belts and chains and stuff in there. Pinsetters are full of pinch hazards and move multiple pins and balls around at the same time. It's not a trivial amount of force, especially if you consider how the tension in a chain translates to a crushing force if you get in between a sprocket and chain, or how the the force in a 1m long arm lifting a 1.5kg pin translates to a crushing force at the centre of rotation. Not to mention the machines are beefy and have to withstand parts of them being hit by 10kg bowling balls. A quick google search indicates a pinsetter machine weighs more than a ton. You could easily lose your shirt, finger or get your hoodie strings caught in there. You'd have to be unlucky to die but it's happened.
"Just restricting the force" doesn't work because the force at pinch points will be huge in normal operation and the extra force to slice your finger off at a pinch point would be noise compared to all the other forces.
I also ask myself: why isn't the pin setter machine always completely powered off when any maintenance is done? If this does not suffice, add a photoelectric barrier that immediately cuts the power of the pin setter machine if it is crossed by some maintenance personal.
Valid question but the reason is the mechanics in the back are usually a salty kind (and some drink a LOT in the back) and they'll get a call to fix a lodged pin or something and decide to not turn the power off and bad things sometimes happen. I knew one back in the day that ripped up his arm really bad and had to take a lot of time off.
In those cases, the fault isn't the machines, it's the negligence of the mechanics.
Where I work, we produce industrial machines that could rip you in half without a hiccup. As a result we (like all industries that use hazardous equipment) have a very strong lock out/tag out policy.
I remember in training they warned us that at customer sites, it's common for the customer's employees to be averse to LOTO because of the time and hassle involved, and they may try to pressure us to skip LOTO procedures. We are expressly prohibited from doing so, but the negligence is real.
100%. My father in law has spent a lot of time in industrial space and he told me they setup dual buttons for some machines so you are required to press them both with both hands. This prevents them from having a free arm at risk.
You have to prevent people from going rogue, otherwise they will.
Johnwalkr had some good reasons. The machines are old, with gears and belts to transfer motion not something made with separate motors for each motion. I never saw the specific machine I am mentioning but I wouldn't be surprised if protective parts of the machines stayed off to make it easier to fix malfunctions.
The machines were designed at a different time. I've been in the back of a few alleys as a kid and they seemed a few steps, but not that many, beyond the shops where all tools were driven by belts from the ceiling. For example power looms severely injured people in a time before they were designed with safety guards and that's just moving thread>
I guess this is also the reason for the dangerously strong forces involved: lots of outputs (surfaces that move pins) powered from few big motors because there's hardly any control besides synchronisation through gears. If the market was big enough to support the adoption of robots arms to the pin setting use case there would be neither strings nor danger from old string-less machines.
Industrial robots are far more dangerous as they can typically move fully in 3d, whereas an old mechanical system like these… yes it has a gazillion pinch points and minimal guards, but at least each movement will only do one thrust by (eg stroke back and forth or spin).
They're 1.5kg and the machine slides them, not lifts. Even if it did need to put exactly that much force to lift them, 15kg is really unlikely to kill you - toddlers keep jumping on parents without murdering them.
Everything shown in the industry backs up the claim of its dangerousness to the point where this entire article revolves around an industry changing in order to make up for that.
Why would you, somebody who is not in the industry and has absolutely no clue about this, have an opinion this strongly held?
>Why would you, somebody who is not in the industry and has absolutely no clue about this, have an opinion this strongly held?
This happens absolutely constantly on cough various websites around the internet. People who are always the smartest people in the room in their industries commenting on topics like pinsetting machines. Pinch hazards are unbelievably dangerous and kill or maim lots of people every year. Operator fatigue, poor design, and thousands of other factors obviously contribute. But they wouldn't know because they've never worked in those spaces.
This was not an opinion about the machine or industry. I asked why the forces are necessary exactly because I don't know that part.
I disagree with the response about the pin weight, because I've got enough clue about mechanics and safety to know it's very unlikely to be a full explanation. The lifting happens either on a conveyor or the lift/harness. We have existing systems that can ensure you don't crush people with the weight itself this way. The dangerousness may come from different parts like higher torque motors, or exposed parts, or programming issues, or ... So feel free to comment on that if you know the answer.
Basically, it's not just the force to move a single 1.5 kg pin. It's the force needed to move ten of those pins, plus the machinery for lifting and setting them into place, all of which needs to be overbuilt because it's being repeatedly hit by flying pins and possibly even the occasional ricocheting 7kg ball, and needs to stand up to that kind of treatment day in, day out for years or decades without completely falling apart. And then, because people like their games to keep moving, the drive mechanism for moving that whole huge assembly around needs to apply enough force to be able to raise and lower it quite quickly.
I'm no expert in any of this, but just taking one quick look at it I'm not at all surprised to find out that these machines are invariably hazardous. And probably most the ones in operation are even scarier than the one in that video I linked above, because it's a relatively recent model and, at least at the place I have been bowling, all the equipment looks like it could easily be older than I am.
If you want a system that only needs to be able to apply enough force to lift a single 1.5kg pin, well, it sounds like that's why the string setting machine was invented.
I recommend watching a video[1] about how these things work. I really don't see how it's feasible to make this complex, heavy machine inherently safe to stick your arms in. And keep in mind these machines have been iterated on for 100 years or more by multiple companies. Modern ones are full of safety features, but they revolve around lockouts, not making everything so weak it can't hurt you.
It’s an upgrade of it makes bowling alleys less expensive, or helps keep existing ones in business or helps open up the market for new ones. We are losing bowling alleys at a rapid clip, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good here.
If an economic system continuously gets in the way of having nice things, the problem isn't the nice things.
Community-centric recreation spaces are getting squeezed out in general, because fewer people have disposable income. And it's not just bowling alleys, with the complex equipment. Skating rinks are basically just a warehouse with some lines on the ground, and they've been going away too.
If skating rinks are going away I would bet they are being replaced by entertainment for people with _more_ disposable income, like trampoline parks. It's a rich country.
It requires account. Also, average does not say much about actual number of people with increased disposable income, that's what matters on this market. What about median?
That says disposable income per capita is up, but nothing about how it is distributed. Give Elon and a few others an extra 50 billion each and that will bump the national average even if everyone else goes slightly backwards.
> We are losing bowling alleys at a rapid clip, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good here.
This isn't a case of perfect being the enemy of good. The strings aren't good. If that's the future of bowling, then I'm not bowling in the future and no longer care if bowling alleys go away.
Maybe, but if maintaining the current standard of the game requires the sacrifice of multiple human lives each year then it doesn't seem like there is much of an argument against downgrading.
That's a false dichotomy, it doesn't "require" the sacrifice, they could definitely make the machines more safe, or make working on them safer, but likely they were made before worker safety was considered so critical and "pinsetter mechanic" is probably too niche to get special work safety provisions.
They have made them safer—by reducing the complexity of the machines and the frequency of necessary human intervention by adding strings to pull the pins back into place.
Yeah, that's not what is meant above by "machines", they mean machines that have equivalent function, not machines that result in a different game.
Looking at accident reports, it sounds like there are some easy changes, adding guards to the machines and changing industry practices to de-energize the machines during the maintenance activity: https://www.atlantictraining.com/blog/bowling-alley-worker-s...
It's even better when supposedly one of these deaths occurred due to "Extreme bowling" which apparently involves a half pipe. So yeah, this comes off as extremely misleading and just for clicks.
You'd probably save more lives banning all the beer and unhealthy food served at the alley, or by banning sports with a higher death toll, like soccer.
Strikes me as a way for alleys to operate cheaper by several magnitudes, and then just cover that up in safety rather than say "look people don't want to pay enough to bowl with machines"
I'm sorry, but you were the one suggesting that 4 deaths somehow didn't suffice to meet the criteria of "multiple deaths" which seems absurd and in defiance of any common use of the language.
Half as Interesting does a lot of explaining what things are and asserting that there is a controversy instead of describing what specifically is controversial or getting bowlers' opinion on the change. I guess that's why we have the LA Times article to read.
My bowling alley renovated and now uses these string pins. They are awful, they keep tangling and jam more than their old counterpart, they are horrible to look at, and there's a lot of instances of pins just dangling oh so subtly instead of falling down like they would without a string.
Terrible, terrible change. Maybe it's just my alley that cheaped out on it, but still not a good impression at all.
I’m saddened to hear they’re being installed in real bowling alleys. They seemed like a good compromise for bars and movie theaters. I thought the idea was you can fit them in places that you ordinarily couldn’t. They are better than nothing but are not a substitute for the real thing IMO.
Yep. My father has bowled in a league since the early 1970s—he’s 86 and still active and spry.
This is his first league using stringed pins and he says everyone’s average is down. Pins that used to fall just don’t and it’s not as enjoyable. He said it’s his last year in a league. :-(
Edit: his old alley went out of business during the pandemic. The building was purchased by a cannabis dispensary (Massachusetts). A new alley opened up down the road (the only alley in town) and they only have string bowling.
I've tried it only once (one full round), and I always had a feeling, that the ropes were stopping/slowing down the front pins (directly hit), so they hit less of the pins behind them (the ones not hit by the ball directly). With a classic machine and the largest ball, slightly off center, but straight, the ball would take out one half, and the front pin or two would take down the other half of the pins... but not with the ropes attached.
Maybe it was subjective, or just a different alley, but it felt worse for me.
Better I say it before dang or another mod says it: Your comment, especially the unwarranted retreat to antagonistic expressions, doesn't contribute to a worthwhile discussion. I'd ask that you try to angle your comments to be more constructive.
This doesn't seem like tech-based enshittification. If anything, this is a low tech and super simple (albeit not as satisfying) solution to the problem of replacing pins. We need to stop using that word before it loses all meaning.
Think of it as "tech" the industry, not "tech" as in "new technology".
Its more related to the fundamental bravado of walking into an industry you lack a deep knowledge or understanding of, but still have a strong belief you can "do it better".
Let's go back to the source, Cory Doctorow's article:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification...
It would seem not to apply here. Bowling alleys don't really have a two-sided marketplace; they don't have business customers to sell the fruits of abusing their bowling customers, if you could call subjecting bowlers to a more annoying set of pins "abuse".
I don't see the business-customer aspect as essential for enshittification to happen. In the end, it's about the platforms wanting to maximize value for themselves, once they've captured the user base. A third party of business customers being involved, and maybe also abused, is rather incidental, and makes no difference for the users who end up with the bad experience.
>I don't see the business-customer aspect as essential for enshittification to happen
If you don't make this distinction, then "enshittification" is no different from "P/E-style value extraction" which has been around long before tech industry. The destruction of Sears was done purely on a profit motive but did not happen in the same manner of tech platforms today.
Furthermore, I don't see how a bowling alley is now a "platform". These are individual businesses taking cost cutting measures to keep the lights on because the sport is dying.
And that really gets to the heart of it. Safety-ism being played as a trump card is another great example. People confuse claims of enshittification with some kind of Marxist, class-based discourse, which in this case would be nullified by concerns for some worker, but that's not what it's about. Enshittification says that there can be no transcendent values, like aesthetics or adherence to tradition, but instead that money rules over all.
It's a bit unfortunate, but with maintenance staff retiring and becoming harder to find, bowling lanes struggling financially, it's a potential alternative.
What's notable is that string pinsetters have only recently been standardized (and that's AFAIK still an ongoing process), because they have been wildly inconsistent. USBC has a recent update here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvb0VmlHDU
Ultimately, I much prefer free fall bowling, but if the choice is between "string bowling on a USBC certified pinsetter" and "no bowling", I'll choose the strings. It's not a completely different game (like Duckpin, 9-Pin, or Candlepin), and it's still good - but it's different.
Most struggle financially because they are run by morons just like restaurants. They tried to be something they weren't. Forgot their core audience. And bowlero ate their lunch in the segment they tried to cater to instead of the core.
Many lanes are $50-80/hr now. I've seen over $100/hr too. Many have jacked the price up and they're still struggling.
My league alley bumped it up to $6/game for league members. I don't mind that. But if you sell by the hour, you're going to get less food and alcohol purchases. If our league and the other weren't at that alley, on Saturdays they would have nobody there bowling from open at 10am until at least 2pm.
The pricing per hour makes sense when people are deliberately bowling slow and just hanging out. You don't want lanes tied up if they are paying per game and taking forever.
But the structures they have now are ridiculous and make no sense.
They'd do better if they paid attention to how hotels do yield management.
"Nothing could be done about the muted sound. It’s like hearing a drum roll — the ball charging down the lane — with no crashing cymbal at the end. That crescendo and climax, Mills insists, is a visceral part “of the experience of smashing pins with a heavy ball.”
I haven't tried the strings yet, but the sounds of bowling are a big deal to me. Just walking into a bowling alley and hearing the sounds of pins being hit makes me feel good, and puts my in the right frame of mind. Without the crash, I feel like bowling would feel empty to me.
My dad set pins manually when he wasa teenager. There was a pedal he stepped on and then he had to put pins on the spikes and hop back up on a shelf above the pins. There were people who didn't wait for the pinsetters to get out of the way and retribution was funny ... They'd hold the pedal down so the spikes were still in the pins and the ball would simply bounce back up the alley.
> Nothing could be done about the muted sound. It’s like hearing a drum roll — the ball charging down the lane — with no crashing cymbal at the end. That crescendo and climax, Mills insists, is a visceral part “of the experience of smashing pins with a heavy ball.”
This reminds me so much of the nostalgia and conflict over Formula 1 engine sounds:
I wonder if we could put a mic by the pins and play it back amplified. It’s still not the “same” which I’m guessing is the bigger problem, but it at least would be more sensory feedback in the short term.
You may well be aware that car manufacturers are doing something like this right now [1] in combustion engined cars. Hyundai is taking it a step further in their Ioniq 5 N EV, which has three different artificial sounds, one of which sounds like a sporty combustion engine exhaust, but the other two sound completely different [2].
That's not even just sounds, the Ioniq doesn't even have gears, and those paddles usually control regen level instead. The entire experience of having an engine with gears in that video is simulated!
There's nothing like ripping around Spa (in VR, of course) in the F2004 on Assetto Corsa. Sure, the SF70H/71H turbo-hybrid is faster but it definitely doesn't have the same experience. Those V12s sound ANGY
Around 2011 or 2012 the official F1 PlayStation game had a mode where you could drive the classic F1 cars. The game wasn't very good (and nothing like serious sim racing), but that classic car mode with the accompanying sound was great.
Hmm... sensors read the vector/spin/color of the ball as it travels down the lane and models its trajectory, the real ball drops into a concealed pit at the end of the lane just before where the pins would be, the screen shows a real-time physics modelled result of the pins dropping complete with a virtual representation of your ball. You could get fancy and have cartoon character pins for kids... maybe best not to think about this anymore.
motion capture markers in the bowling suit you rented on arrival transform you, in the eyes of everyone's VR goggles, into the temporary skin that came with your Frozen 3-themed Game & Ice Cream combo ticket. you appear as kristoff, your buddy appears as elsa. actually eating the ice cream is prohibited without an active Disney+ subscription, be sure to link your account prior to arrival. more sophisticated players snicker quietly to one another about your plebeian choice of a mass-market skin; they are of course using limited-edition outfits that were bought or earned. bowling professionals and top amateurs enjoy individually rigged tailoring bearing sponsor logos. no-one looks like themselves. each strike builds up "golden balls" that can be spent as an in-alley currency for powerups e.g. allowing you roll again, or to penalise an opponent. gameplay never supplies enough of the golden balls but you can buy more with real money, or earn small increments by orating the slogan of an apparel company to the satisfaction of a performance-judging ai. the ai has a reputation for penalising foreign accents but this is hotly denied. after the game you are awarded special tokens that can only be spent on hats
> the real ball drops into a concealed pit at the end of the lane just before where the pins would be
The sexy way to implement this (horrible) idea is to have a smoke/fog curtain at the end of the lane, and project onto the fog. The ball could slide through silently, and then the synthetic image (and sound!) would be cued.
I imagine the wind from the ball passing through would disrupt a sheet of fog too much to see the pins bounce around, but it would be cool to see 10 narrow columns of tightly collimated fog with pins projected on them.
Maybe there's a big sheet of glass suspended at an angle around the last quarter of the lane. The ball rolls under the glass into darkness and is visually replaced seamlessly by the virtual ball shown on a screen hanging on the ceiling, facing away from the bowlers- a Pepper's Ghost effect.
The first issue with this of course is that it would only work from certain angles; the possibly larger issue is that you'd have people rolling bowling balls at a giant sheet of glass.
Reminds me of Topgolf. It's fun to see the occasionally considerable difference between the motion trackers and hole sensors. You'd see the ball stranding on the field, but then the hole would light up and you'd get the points.
The focus is golf, but they do have a bowling mode where you throw the ball and the camera picks it up and simulates it on the projector. It's not attempting to replace the bowling alley in town though.
The golf sims are really fun. It’s maybe one of the best AR experiences. Real clubs, real ball, and software and hardware to track the shot and put it in on a course.
Genius! It does make me think how much you could virtualize the experience while still requiring the same mechanics / ball control. Sort of like those virtual gold driving ranges.
Here's an idea: instead of requiring the whole 60ft lane, just have a lane ~10 ft long with a trap at the end. Based on the measured spin, angle etc, you could project the trajectory down the virtual lane.
Use one of those head-tracking techs (Dimenco screens?)
This would allow you to have like 3x-4x the number of bowling lanes in the same building footprint.
Funny that this is being touted as new technology when throughout my youth I can only remember bowling at lanes that used string pinsetters. The fancy mechanical ones only came much later, and at least in Europe plenty of places never bothered to upgrade at all and still work this way. So this is less of an upgrade and more a reversion to an older, simpler, cheaper way of doing things.
"European bowling alleys have used string pinsetters for decades because they require less energy and maintenance. All you need is someone at the front counter to run back when the strings tangle.
"But Americans have long treated this technology as a gimmick, relegating it to arcade-style games in restaurants and bars. The bowling congress knew that conferring official status meant confronting a stigma."
I was going to say—i've rolled a lot of 5-pin and pretty much every alley i've been to was string-set. It didn't take away from the game imo, so i'm a little surprised about people's complaining that its going to ruin the game.
perhaps the strings need to be shorter in 10-pin to prevent tangling, which has an effect on things.
Surely there are ways to improve and simplify the pinsetting machine without resorting to strings? I suppose it's not a glamorous engineering challenge but this feels like a pretty lazy "solution"
For such an old problem that's clearly had a lot of incentive to reduce cost, you can be sure people have tried really hard to improve it. The fact that they're resorting to a lower tech solution to save maintenance costs shows how hard engineering for reliability is.
When I was working on trains, I was surprised how old fashioned everything was. It hadn't really changed in 100 years. But once you see what an absolute beating they take continuously in normal operation, and the high cost of taking a wagon out of service for any reason - let alone the cost of performing maintenance itself, you realize the value in big dumb machines that just keep on working even if they underperform by some less financially important metrics. There are high-tech trains of course, with modern wonders like electricity and even computers, but they're expensive and don't make sense in many applications.
A lot of "surely they could improve that"s end up meaning "surely they could spend more money on that".
I see what you're saying, and I'm sure mechanical engineers have been involved who know what they're doing. It might not be as simple as it seems.
On the other hand, sometimes a product really is behind the times. This is probably a relatively small, niche market. Most of your sales probably happen only when a new bowling alley is built.
Outsiders might not want to invest in trying to break into the market. It's expensive to create a new design and set up a factory. And then you have to convince buyers to buy from you, the upstart, instead of companies that have been selling pinsetters since the 1950s. And if you succeed, the reward might not be that large.
The established companies might have a perverse incentive against innovating. The machines seem to do the job but require a good amount of maintenance, so the manufacturers might get a nice, steady stream of income from replacement parts and/or service contracts. Even if they are interested in updating the design, it's probably a safer bet financially to make incremental improvements instead of a radical redesign. (Why rock the boat if you're making money?)
None of this means necessarily means that the traditional pinsetter isn't as good as it can get. I just think it could either way.
Now that I think of it, if a better/safer/cheaper (non-string) pinsetter is possible, ironically maybe the threat of string pinsetters could be what brings it about. If the traditional pinsetter manufacturers see their business threatened (for the first time in decades), maybe it will force their hands and they'll take a risk on a radical redesign.
> you can be sure people have tried really hard to improve it
I am certain they have not. The reason I'm certain of it is because the injury rate can be reduced to zero, without impacting the game, by just turning the equipment off before anyone goes near it.
That's surely a matter of the operator's health and safety policy requiring lock-out/tag-out before working on a machine, just like happens in every factory.
I fear this is going to be a very naive HN comment but: could a robotic arm and some computer vision do it? It seems like a very constrained environment that would be well suited to CV.
That seems plausible, but speed is probably an important requirement. Bowling alleys often charge by the hour, so who wants to go to a bowling alley with slow machines?
The traditional pinsetter machine can sweep away pins in one operation, then set up all the right pins in one more operation. A robot arm can presumably only grab one pin at a time. You probably need multiple robot arms, which adds to the cost.
Yep, not to mention the space requirements. It's hard to imagine fitting several robot arms plus any associated machinery into the relatively limited space at the end of a bowling lane.
Hmm, maybe a hybrid approach would work. The traditional pinsetter has 10 pins ready to go in a holder that lowers them all down from above. That part seems simple enough. The complex part is creating order out of chaos and loading pins into that holder.
Suppose you keep that holder, and then do this:
(1) After the ball comes through, take note of which pins are standing, then immediately sweep them ALL away into an area back behind.
(2) The holder, which already has 10 pins in it, lowers and releases 1-10 pins as appropriate.
(3) While the bowler is taking their next shot, the robot arm works on picking up pins from the back area and refilling the holder.
This way, the robot arm can work in parallel with the bowler taking their next shot. If the bowler is really fast, the robot might still not be able to keep up, but at least it doesn't have to do all its work super quick in a narrow window of time.
I guess it could but you're running into a problem analogous to CPU vs FPGA. A more universal machine will always struggle against the cost and efficiency of a specialised one-job machine.
I wonder if anyone's experimented with a robotic arm and camera approach. That's certainly where my mind goes if trying to design a pinsetter from scratch. I would think something like that could be close to traditional pinsetters on speed, even manipulating pins individually, based on what I've seen of assembly line robots. And it would be far simpler and basically impervious to jams.
That doesn't make sense because you have to move the pins out of the way after they have been knocked over. If they are attached to the lane at the bottom then where do they go?
• Make holes in the lane right under the pins, where the pins are each sitting on a little two-sided door with a hole in it just wide enough for the string to go through to the bottom of the pin.
• Knocked-over pins pull on the string, which causes their door to open, the pin to get pulled down into the now-open hole, and the door to close after them.
• Once you've cleared all the pins, the doors all open up, the pins are pushed back up, and the doors close.
• Throw in an optical sensor that notices any pins that are out-of-place but not tipped after a bowl, and brute-force resets them by swallowing them and then spitting them back out. (Or, alternately, swallow all the pins, then spit back out the remaining pins, after every bowl.)
In a way, it's still a pin-setting machine. But it's more like ten little individual pin-setting machines, that can't interfere with one-another.
The pins' strings could still get tangled, though. So it's not a perfect solution.
---
That being said, my own favored solution would just involve a regular pin-setter "sweeper", plus a robot arm behind the lane that does its re-setting using Computer Vision using top-down and side-on lane cameras.
In other words: have a robot do exactly the job that a human pin-setter did.
Robots don't exactly have great dexterity for this kind of thing, but you can make it easier on the robot by putting electromagnets under the lane at each pin position — and a bit of a light ferrous metal on the bottom of each pin — so that the pins can just snap into place when brought close enough to the target zone, rather than needing to be set down carefully and exactly. (This would have helped human pin-setters too!)
I visited the National Bowling Museum near Dallas as a spontaneous joke with some friends. Impressive museum for bowling. My favorite part was an animatronic pin boy talking about how he was making a lot of money setting pins and was moving up soon to shoe rentals. Hilarious. Highly recommend checking it out if you are in the area.
Yeah they mention that happening, where you pick up a spare without the ball or th e pins you hit deflecting into it. Just the string from a pin taking it down.
So they say less strikes and scores not that far off, but it's stupid. Players are getting phantom spares and probably some phantom strikes with the strings.
Here's an even crazier idea: get the players (i.e. the people bowling) to reset the pins by hand, manually. To make that safe, just let them deploy some walls along the lane while they do that. The person currently doing the resetting could sit in a little view station above the pins during normal play, protected by plexiglass.
Even better: a gig app where people nearby can bid to come reset the pins for you. Also, the score gets stored on the blockchain, for safeguarding and eliminate any arguments. The app can also gamify bowling with fun challenges (like, "Get 2 strikes in a row").
Hey can the reward be a little video of an anthropomorphic bowling ball and pins? It's not the same as back in the 90s: now you can get an NFT of it and trade it!
TFA is clear that string pinsetters have been common in Europe for a long time and even quotes a German manufacturer of the equipment.
Perhaps the title should read "String pinsetters are upending American bowling" to ensure the international audience moves on to something they find more relevant.
I wonder if some smaller lanes would go back to having pinsetters. If you only have a lane or two, and the machines cost that much to maintain and run, perhaps a kid isn't that expensive.
And of course, you charge more because it's luxury bowling.
The framing of this as being turned "upside-down by technology" is a bit weird. Surely the string solution is the much lower tech way of dealing with this than the pin setting machines?
We went from 5 bowling alleys in the area down to 1 in the last couple years. They took out of lanes and put in axe throwing, ticket dispensing games, and bumper cars.
I guess I don't see why the strings need to remain attached. They should use electromagnets on wires that can be released and withdrawn once the pins are in place.
Then, to recover the bowled pins, use OpenCV or something to guide the wires to their latching points at the tops of the pins.
A robotic arm capable of lifting a single bowling pin would cost $40-50,000, would be slow as shit at resetting 10 of them, and wouldn't pay for the rest of the mechanism such as catching and returning bowling balls. A mechanical pin setter with bowling ball return costs less than that even with the cost of delivery and installation.
I'd imagine this would be orders of magnitude more expensive and error-prone than the existing solution. Also I don't even think robot arms are sufficiently agile for this task, since the pins can end up in unpredictable locations and positions.
https://archive.ph/CpzGu