2point8

1. jim Jun 01 2007 / 7am

   I call it a tie.
2. matt Jun 01 2007 / 8am

   If you hadn’t kicked the robot’s ass, it might have been time to call it a day…
3. Dee Jun 01 2007 / 8am

   It’s amazing but the robots shot on flash corner is pretty good actually.

   I guess statistically, the robot is bound to make a couple of nice photos here and there…
   So there’s hope for me!
4. Scott Jun 01 2007 / 9am

   MDM 1 : Robot 0

   Robot version 2.0 might be tougher to beat though. I hear it will be outfitted with a Leica.
5. shockman Jun 01 2007 / 12pm

   MDM wins, altho robot did capture cool $ graffitti in round 4. But can we be sure that’s not a robot dog that MDM planted on the sill in Round 5? I say no.
6. BryanF Jun 01 2007 / 2pm

   as always, you’re way ahead of the curve.

   now let’s see if google can creatively edit and sequence their photographs
7. Raoul Jun 01 2007 / 6pm

   Nice effort from the robot on Round 4, but it still needs to look at more photo books.

   Btw, anybody know how Google did it? By that I mean what kind of technology/equipment?
8. andrew Jun 01 2007 / 6pm

   so great! I love google’s Great Wall shot, with the echoing checkerboard sweater. but you da champ.
9. bennybedlam Jun 01 2007 / 8pm

   android adams. (but you win)
10. toong_bo Jun 01 2007 / 8pm

    “The reader can demonstrate the point by clicking off a roll with the family Instamatic or Leica without moving from his chair: point the machine at random this way and that, quickly and without thought. When the film is developed every frame will define a subject different from any defined before. To make matters worse, some of the pictures are likely to be marginally interesting. Even the automatic cameras that record the comings and goings in banks describe facts and relationships that surprise mere eye-witnesses.”

    -John Szarkowski
11. Robert Wright Jun 01 2007 / 10pm

    Stephen Shore talked at B&N a while back about a researcher he had been talking to, doing research into A.I. kinds of things, and they were trying to get a robot to recognize features in a landscape, so they needed some “pictures” of landscapes, so to be scientific, they set up some kind of random robot camera to make “pictures”, but they were no help in teaching the AI anything-they were too haphazard, so that’s how Shore got involved, they used some of his street scenes to teach the robot how to see. Same idea. BTW, robot is showing some chops in round 4…but it was overmatched from the beginning…
12. Michael David Murphy Jun 02 2007 / 11pm

    tb, that shark quote reminds me of a film I once saw comprised entirely of security camera footage from Berlin. The edit was thrilling. Completely boring, with sharp, insane moments of terror every once in awhile - bank robberies and the like. But you had to sit through 20 minutes of nothingness to get there.

    A camera that’s on all the time will eventually record something interesting. A camera that’s on once, but everywhere (the google example) will find something interesting, too, eventually.
13. Michael David Murphy Jun 04 2007 / 8am

    dee - mousing around noflashcorner is lots of fun, from afar. i can almost smell the leather. the whole corner smells like leather, thanks to Coach.

    along - i hadn’t seen that checkerboard sweater. awesome! at first, i was just going to post interesting street shots i’d found in street views, but scrolling through all that stuff hoping to find something was maddening.
14. Bill Compton Jun 04 2007 / 2pm

    Hi Jim. Photos i received. Thanks
15. Lara Wechsler Jun 04 2007 / 9pm

    Interesting, I am waiting for remote control cameras where I can fly my camera around like a model airplane while sitting in my apartment staring at an LCD screen able to press the remote when i want it too snap a photo. Maybe they will have that ready available when I am immobile so I can still shoot.
16. Tim Connor Jun 08 2007 / 12pm

    Neat stuff. I used to fantasize about walking around & blinking my eyes to take a picture but that meant having to be there.
17. jon Jun 08 2007 / 12pm

    as soon as i saw this:

    http://preview.tinyurl.com/2bdtha

    i thought “man mdm *has* to have written about street view, or better soon”
18. Nils Jun 09 2007 / 2pm

    Funny, Round 4: Google almost delivered a knockout there. Nice idea.
19. Madison Guy Jul 18 2007 / 4pm

    Interesting concept and competition. Congrats on the human victory, MDM, holding the line against the robot onslaught — for th etime being…

    But we’re in the early stages — sort of like the first computerized chess demos in which the grandmasters trounced the robots a few decades back. Not so easy now.

    Now that point and shoot cameras are boasting face recognition technology, a little tweaking will probably give the little devils some spooky seeming skill sets one of these days. The wonders of technology…