Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]

This was really well explained and interesting.<p>Funnily enough I&#x27;m pretty sure this is a really similar method to urinal design, so if this whole basketball thing doesn&#x27;t work out for ya, you could always work for American Standard...

Really impressed with the use of Monte Carlo method. A while back I ran into some resistance trying to advocate simpler statistical methods to solve a problem domain similar to this, while the team in question repeatedly wanted to reach for a machine learning solution. I&#x27;d love to know if I was wrong here. In my mind, when an algorithmic or heuristic path to a solution is available, we should attempt it first before reaching for ML.

Did other people also wonder what a French cleat might be? <i>It is a molding with a 30–45 degree slope used to hang cabinets or other objects.</i><p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;French_cleat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;French_cleat</a>

I love this! I was expecting something more like Mark Rober&#x27;s movign dartboard [0], which is super cool, but this is even more interesting, because of the way you used software to come up with a general solution in advance.<p>Kudos!

That was a pretty cool video! I loved how he used 3D Monte-Carlo and side-stepped all the complicated math. I wonder if he was using a Physics engine like Bullet or ODE to calculate the simulated trajectories. Also, a good intermediate step might&#x27;ve been to build the backboard in something like Unity and shoot some hoops to catch the radius error before actually machining it out.

Very out of left field, but how does one start doing these kind of things?<p>My background is in CS and math, and I could have come up with and built everything up to exporting the mesh into triangles, but would have needed months of google searching and trial and error to do the actual &quot;machining&quot; part of things.<p>And then even if I went through the painful process of learning it on the job for this task, the learned skills would probably not transfer very well into the next adventure. Additionally, I imagine the machine used in the video is fairly expensive and not worth purchasing for one experiment.<p>I&#x27;m asking this because I find these kind of builds fascinating, but I&#x27;m always humbled about my skills when I think about the transition from digital to material.

This appears to be a massively underrated YouTube channel. I love it when I find one of these.<p>I&#x27;ve also never seen someone cut wood on their Tormach CNC. Seems to work well!

A non-US perspective: it&#x27;s quite weird hearing someone younger than about 50-60yo use inches as a measurement. Especially for something scientific.

Aside from the Apollo 13 in Real Time website, this is the coolest thing I&#x27;ve seen on the internet in the last 3 months.<p>Sent this to my brother, which of course precipitated a huge sibling argument about which player would&#x27;ve benefited more from this assuming we&#x27;re talking about players that tend to shoot jump shots. I&#x27;ll let you guys know who wins.<p>Edit: We mostly disagree on the <i>type</i> of shot that certain players make and which would be more advantageous here. And credit to the creator, he alludes to this early in the video where he talks about &quot;line drive&quot; vs &quot;arc&quot; shots.

I want before&#x2F;after shot %. Also someone should totally sell these. We already have short hero hoops, with this hoop we could all be Kobe every day, circus shots in the general direction, 55% fg%, legendary!

I wonder if Greg Egan reads HN or whether he learnt about this in some other way, but this was his analysis of the same problem from five hours ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;gregeganSF&#x2F;status&#x2F;1251390966356795392" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;gregeganSF&#x2F;status&#x2F;1251390966356795392</a>

I mean, is it really Monte Carlo? He&#x27;s iteratively trying to optimize a function which makes this more like SGD, no?

To say I’m impressed by the video and more specifically the algorithm would be the understatement of the century. This is amazing. Please let me buy one :)

Next level: a camera and a couple of motors to see the speed&#x2F;location of the ball and adjust the backboard accordingly.

Any physics experts know what the actual optimal shape is? I imagine it would be a pretty gnarly problem to work out.

Red Auerbach knew something in real life. If you bend the whole rim downward, even a little bit, it becomes a “sewer,” pro just-miss shots start going in. He would check the baskets, before each game, to make sure this wasn’t being used against the Celtics.

Absolutely brilliant. The plot twist requiring the additional metal bracket at the end was fantastic.<p>To err is human. To own it on YouTube, divine.

Does it bug anyone else not to have the analytic solution?

So I am guessing that the reason why this doesn&#x27;t look like a sattelite dish is because 1) the focal point is not in the centre and 2) the ball doesn&#x27;t rebound in straight lines.<p>Oh shoot, he does actually explain this exactly. He also mentions 3) speed of the ball. And then, 4) for lines that hit at the same point but with different trajectories and speeds, he takes the &quot;average basketball shot&quot;.<p>The only other thing I am wondering about is what would happen if the ball were flat.

This is very cool. If you can mass produce such boards (plastic molds maybe?), It could be a fun novelty gadget&#x2F;gift

The style of presentation, the manner of speaking, seems to be inspired by This Old Tony [0]. This is no bad thing. I wonder if Tony picked it up from somewhere else.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;featony&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;featony&#x2F;videos</a>

Clearly the hoop that minimizes shots is what exists at funfairs all over the world.<p>Would making the backboard convex make it near-impossible to hit? What about making the curve imperceptible so it&#x27;s hard to notice it&#x27;s helping&#x2F;hurting?

This is pretty cool! I wonder if he could also figure out, which attempted balls would naturally go in vs through the help from the backboard!

This is very cool. As I watched the video, I began to think about a stupidly over-the-top version of the backstop that uses many real-time-deformable panels similar to the adaptive-optic mirrors used in advanced astronomical telescopes but informed to guide the ball by a machine vision view of the inbound ball in flight.

Isn&#x27;t it a backboard, not a hoop?

I’m not really impressed. This only applies to shots directly taken from the free throw line . Make a basketball hoop that moves based on ball flight Now that would be impressive. I have seen someone on YouTube do that with a dart board.

Did anyone else imagine just a very large hoop?

Really neat project! Loved watching the video. Do you have the code in a Github repo?

I really enjoyed the length and depth of this video. Though I wonder if a good hybrid strategy for YT popularity is to have a viral-edited video on a main channel, and more depth linked on a second channel.

I think the results would have been much better if he&#x27;d taken into account the rotational inertia of the ball... It turns out that affects the bounce angle quite significantly...

Can anyone tell me what tablet and app he is using for the drawing?

nice work! you could probably speed the computation quite a lot by using a small deformation basis (e.g. using modal analysis) and optimize in this smaller space instead.

Do the inverse of this and open a stand at a fair :-)

Now I want to make a backboard that always misses unless you know the right amount of spin to put on the ball.

So do you use only one spot to shoot from for the data collection or do you shoot from all over the floor?

Can someone briefly eli5 how the Monte Carlo simulations feed into learning the optimal surface?

Does this only work if you’re exactly aligned in front of the hoop? (eg Free-Throw Line)

This is so awesome! I love the way you went about solving this problem.

I thought this was really cool, keep up the good work!

That was really cool, thank you!

Good work. thanks for sharing

convexity!

&quot;Who is Monte Carlo?&quot; Monte Carlo is for Europe what Las Vegas is for the US. The first name that comes to mind when you think gambling.<p>Monte Carlo method is repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results.<p>Monte Carlo algorithms are heuristic algorithms that solve problems with random process that can give wrong answers.<p>Las Vegas algorithms are algorithms that solve problems with randomness but get always correct result or knows that it failed. Runtime is finite.<p>Atlantic City algorithm is a probabilistic polynomial time algorithm that gives correct answer &gt; 50% of the time (or 75% of the time by some definition).

Nope, expected something interesting, but this is based on a boring brute-force simulation.<p>He did hint at using a parabolic shape, like in satellite dishes. Why not use some actual calculus and differential equations to figure out the optimal parabolic-like shape here?

The first 10 seconds pretty much covers the subject.<p>It&#x27;s not the hoop, it&#x27;s the shape of the backboard, which is a reflector formed to focus the ball on the target.<p>Now, the really cool thing would to build a flat backboard with controlled bounce properties. Interesting 3D printing problem. That would look like an ordinary backboard but still focus bounces.

Is this not something that just an optics equation in Physics would give you? Specially if not taking the radius of the ball into effect.

Who uses the back board? This doesn&#x27;t help at all with &quot;nothin&#x27; but net&quot;