[petsfed]

Well, the tricky bit here is that the route setter, a human, is the one actually solving the problem. So the problem as set is (and must be) a human creation first. This is especially true in outdoor climbing, where the first ascent process might involve the installation of anchor fixtures, or the removal of poorly-secured features for safety. You'd need some pretty wild sensor suites to correctly differentiate between a really good hold, and a dangerous flake that will peel off the wall if the slightest force is applied to it. The AI just generates potential solutions to the problem once the holds are found/placed. Certainly, there's some interesting conversations about how satisfying it is to solve a rubick's cube using somebody's algorithm vs. just figuring it out, but its not like the computer is inventing a rubick's cube.

Embedded in your comment is the idea that AI might create boulder problems or routes in climbing gyms, and the human (or eventually robot) just follows that plan in bolting the holds to the wall. I expect that for a long time, AI generated climbing routes would rarely be good, but would consistently be physiologically impossible, feature uninteresting movement, or be too easy.

Its easy enough to shotgun holds up onto the wall based on some imagined sequence, the real skill of route setting is to (as the GP pointed out) figure out what's physically possible and also fun and challenging.

[ethbr1]

> Embedded in your comment is the idea that AI might create boulder problems or routes in climbing gyms, and the human (or eventually robot) just follows that plan in bolting the holds to the wall.

This would follow the exact path image GenAI evolved through.

Step 1: Teach a model to recognize objects from noisy data.

Step 2: Reverse-feed that model random noise and force it to hallucinate that noise back into likely objects.

As there's probably physics simulation at some point in this particular scenario, there'd probably also be step 3 of simulating a climb through the generated path to validate feasibility / specific qualities.

It doesn't sound impossible.

[petsfed]

Its certainly not impossible, but that physics simulation is the biggest obstacle that I can see.

[rockfishroll]

Spotting a refugee from rockclimbing.com on hacker news was not on my bingo card for the day. But I guess if I'm here (writing novels about route setting) then I shouldn't be surprised other people are too.

[petsfed]

Outside of a short-lived usurper on instagram selling pet food dishes, I am still the only petsfed on the internet, since 1997.

What's really wild to me is how somebody would recognize a mid-tier poster from a website I thought effectively defunct for nearly 10 years now.

[rockfishroll]

It just goes to show how impactful online communities are capable of being. rockclimbing.com was in it's heyday right as I was discovering climbing. I was a bored kid constructing my entire identity around climbing and there was no other place to do that outside of the gym. No mountain project. No youtube. No social media. I spent a lot of hours lurking those forums. There are only a handful of users I could still name, but I bet I would recognize a lot of them.

[chefandy]

> You'd need some pretty wild sensor suites to correctly differentiate between a really good hold

Ah, I see.

> The AI just generates potential solutions to the problem once the holds are found/placed

Yeah and I think that's really going to be the sweet spot for generative tools for the forseeable future.

> Its easy enough to shotgun holds up onto the wall based on some imagined sequence, the real skill of route setting is to (as the GP pointed out) figure out what's physically possible and also fun and challenging.

Right right. I have a feeling that making a more convincing substitute is primarily a matter of having less access to data than say, paintings and photography which are certainly not less nuanced than this creative task. But as I said, a lot of people care about how something was made, too. I'll bet that's going to be a much bigger factor, at least in marketing, than many realize in the near future.