The shot clock expired 90 seconds ago.
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I suspect that being British is the reason that I have no idea what that comment was about.
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Maybe, the delivery bot actually does the measurements? That’s why it moves about in this oddly way. And the “thrower” is actually really just a a fancy catapult?!
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They had planned to fake the made shot all along (of course) so they didn’t position the camera to catch the entire trajectory. But she swished her first attempt.
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When playing basketball, it’s generally more stylish to aim for a “swish” (as the article refers to it), where the ball passes cleanly through the hoop without touching the rim, backboard, etc, hence the “swish” being onomotopaeic of the ball passing through the net. When a player is particularly confident in their shot, they will sometimes say the word “net” (or “nothing but net” as the classic McDonald’s commercial with Micheal Jordan and Larry Bird plunged into the public consciousness) after releasing the ball as a show of confidence, not unlike a much lower-stakes Babe Ruth-esque calling of which wall he’d hit a home run over.
However, sometimes, due to defenders, etc, it is advantageous to aim for a bank shot (where the ball bounces off the backboard before going through the hoop). Since the convention is to aim for a swish, a similarly confident player would call “bank” before the ball goes through the hoop, so as to indicate to others that the bank off the backboard was intentional and (in the event it goes in) not a lucky break from a wildly-off attempt at a clean “swish”.
The classic example of this, and it’s subversion, is Paul Pierce (notoriously clutch outside shooter) post-game interview after winning a playoff game where the interviewer asks “Did you call bank?” and his answer sidesteps the question.
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It’s actually very interesting that it used the backboard. If it’s calculating the shot each time, banking a shot is a completely different calculation. In other videos, shooting at an angle, it doesn’t use the backboard, which makes me wonder whether it does so for straight on shots or if it just miscalculated and overfired on that particular shot.
I found one video of it shooting free throws and it didn’t use the backboard there, It looks like its “free throws” are taken from an angle, not straight-on, but still…I’m not sure why it banked in a 3 pointer.
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I would say that “bank!” is most often called when a shooter knows he put wayyyy too much on the shot, and the only chance of it going in is a bank…
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For sure, it definitely has the ambiguity of “I meant to do that” - whether it goes in or not, it at least makes you look a little more self-aware.
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A lot of the functions to approximate human motion seems to be applicable to their production lines as well. It’s useful to them to replace human workers on the line.
She did indeed. I bet she got a lot of high fives after she did it. That was one hell of a fluke shot that’s for sure.
If I recall correctly, she said she practiced it for a while and was making about 1 in 3 attempts!
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Came here to mention this too… The basketball robot seems to be much taller than the others and is completely black… Curious to say the least.
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RACISM
(3 more characters and a complete sentense)
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i think the word he’s looking for is cybernetics.
too bad “cyber” ( via oarsmen on the river khyber if memory serves ) got appropriated for everything computer. it was kind of a cool word
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Exactly what I was thinking.
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In some particularly competitive pick-up ball, if you make a banked shot (not a layup) and didn’t call it, it doesn’t count. You don’t lose the ball, but you don’t get the point(s).
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Yeah, but how does it do at SkeeBall???
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Unauthorized copies of the robot’s kicks will be out there in two months.
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If you could spin BasketballBot around and put it in a random location on the court and then it had to pick the ball up on its own before shooting, then the whole situation would look a lot less contrived.
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They could have done a scaled-up basketball version of the dartboard that gives a bullseye every time. That would have been wild.
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