Money 1.12 Ta-You Wu: The Whole Picture:
From Robots To Human Self-Creation
1. Dr. Ching: To conclude our discussion on the big picture of money making, I would like to suggest that we talk about the very subtle problem of touch, which contributes to complete automation. The late Dr. Ta-You Wu, had contributed to knowledge by solving the problem of touch, one of the most complex problems in science.
2. Dr. Kunii: The late Dr. Ta-You Wu, Dr. Ching, and I started the robot touch research in 1995, right after Dr. Ching showed me his solution to ball control, which I recognized immediately was also the solution to robot touch. Japan's Sixth Generation Computer Science was on robotics, but, because of the failure of its Fifth Generation Computer Science on artificial intelligence, its research on robotics was not widely publicized.
3. Prof. Ram: Whoever controls the robotics industry controls manufacturing. Please explain to us, what does ball control have to do with touch ?
4. Prof. Souza: I am not a scientist, but is touch a problem ? and what is ball control ?
5. Dr. Kunii: It is interesting to note that we have solved the problem of touch, before the scientist realizes that touch is a problem. Even Isaac Newton did not realize the problem, and for three hundred years all the scientists since Newton have not recognized that touch is a problem. But, one cannot push an object, if one cannot touch it first.
6. Prof. Souza: I guess that the problem is that touch is so common and prevalent in nature and in every day living, most people take it for granted.
7. Prof. Ram: This is what make the problem and the solution of touch so interesting. Science is subtle, not common sense, the problem of touch is doubly subtle.
8. Dr. Kunii: Ball control is the ability of a player of racket games to keep a ball on the racket for a prolonged period of time during impact so that the player can control the direction, speed, and spin of its subsequent motion. It is the secret of consistency in sports, including golf, baseball, and handball where the hand is used as a racket. Dr. Ching wrote the book Table Tennis, Scientific Analysis, when he was a graduate student at MIT, where he was twice the table tennis champion. The phenomenon of ball control was first described in the book.
9. Dr. Ching: I wrote the book, oddly, because I didn't want the human race to be embarrassed in a Galactic Olympics not knowing the most important phenomenon in sports.
10. Dr. Kunii: Touch is definitely a problem. No one knows this better than the Japanese. Japan's Sixth Generation Computer Science failed because robots cannot touch. The common observation that all human beings, animals, and insects can touch gives most people, including researchers in robotics, the illusion that touch is not a problem. A robot finger bounces of an objects it tries to touch, just as a ball bounces off a racket, regardless of what materials are used. As hard as robot builders try, today, not a single robot can touch. Most of the robots do welding jobs or function in perfectly controlled environments. Without robots with the ability to touch, today, human beings are used as robots to do simple physical work requiring touch. Both ball control and touch are based on the concept of jumpulse, a word which is coined by Dr. Ta-You Wu.
11. Prof. Ram: What is jumpulse ? I understand that Dr. Wu, Dr. Kunii, and Dr. Ching are collaborators of the jumpulse research. How does the term jumpulse actually come about ?
12. Dr. Ching: Dr. Wu in Taiwan and I in USA communicated roughly twice a week over the phone and worked rather intensively on the project. I also communicated through fax with Dr. Kunii in Japan, also weekly. One night, during our first few weeks of communication, I called Dr. Wu about the overall inadequacy of the mathematical foundation of mechanics, in particular, about the infinite numbers of time derivatives needed to describe a spring motion. I mentioned the understandable conflicts between Robert Hooke, the authority in spring mechanics, and Isaac Newton. I suggested to Dr. Wu that we needed to be more creative and adventurous in our thinking. Dr. Wu countered me by saying that it is more important to discover the significance of each derivative than to invent names for all the derivatives, and he really disliked people coining new terms. In particular, he emphasized that he was good in everything except creativity, and the lack of creativity was the reason that he had never discovered anything revolutionary.
13. Prof. Souza: Dr. Wu sounded very confident about his other abilities outside of creativity. He must be extremely analytical, which could be another word for critical. May be he is too analytical to be creative. Then how did he invented the term jumpulse, which sets the foundation for your touch research ?
14. Dr. Ching: Dr. Wu could be one of the most, if not the most, analytical Chinese ever lived. He has a very powerful and disciplined mind, but with me and Dr. Kunii, he gradually became as wild in imagination as we were. Right after I called him that night, he called me back the next day and told me, excitedly, that we had discovered a new phenomenon in physics and he had coined a new name for it. The word he coined was "jumpulse" which was a direct descendent of Newton's impulse. In the next five years of our cooperation up to the time of this death, I came to believe that Dr. Wu was not only the most analytical of all the Chinese, but possibly the most intelligent, overall. Dr. Kunii and I could take some credit in relaxing his mind so that his creativity could come out. Dr. Kunii should particularly be thanked for making the final years of Dr. Wu's life extraordinarily fruitful and meaningful. Dr. Wu died at 95, two years beyond what he had predicted for himself to me at his 90th birthday party. The day before his death, he told reporters in a press conference that he had four noted students, the two famous Nobel Prize winners, the student at his bed side, and Hugh Ching. I am truly honored, and grateful, to be his student.
15. Prof. Ram: One time, Dr. Ching told me that when I and earlier Dr. Kunii were in Taiwan, Dr. Wu tried to visit us, but because of his advanced age, Dr. Ching kindly declined for us. I just hope that our KuniiRamChing Team this time can be as productive as the WuKuniiChing Jumpulse Team. Dr. Ching, would you please define jumpulse for us.
16. Dr. Ching: Jumpulse is a sudden change of force, as impulse is a sudden change of momentum. Dr. Wu defined the term analytically following the analytical definition for impulse, but I think that jumpulse is a perceptive rather that an analytical concept, as is impulse, because it is discovered as much by perceptive visualization as by analytical derivations. Dr. Wu was a perceptive genius among the Chinese, most of whom can be considered perceptive geniuses by world standard. Unfortunately, being perceptive, the Chinese generally refuses to apply analytical rigor; they call analysis bitter thinking. When it comes to thinking, the Chinese like to catch fish in muddy water, or thinking vaguely or perceptively. With his rigorous analytical training, Dr. Wu showed the world the power of the combination of the analytical and the perceptive abilities. All we need is for the Chinese to contribute a few Dr. Wu's to make the Chinese talent in perception not totally wasted.
17. Prof. Lee: Can the phenomenon of ball control be explained so that a layman can understand ?
18. Dr. Kunii: We need to start from distance and time, which every educated person can understand. Velocity is the rate of change of distance with respect to time. It indicates how fast a ball is moving. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. The mass of a ball is equivalent to the weight of the ball. Weight is mass multiplied by the gravitational acceleration. Force is mass multiplied by acceleration. Momentum is mass multiplied by velocity. When a ball hits a wall, it bounces back. During its impact with the wall, the velocity of the ball changes suddenly from moving forward to moving backward or from positive to negative. To account for this sudden change of velocity or momentum, Newton has introduced the concept of impulse, which is a sudden change of momentum. Many scientists have tried to find significance to the rate of change of acceleration, but have not been successful. Here, Dr. Wu and Dr. Ching have discovered that the sudden change of acceleration or force is significant in ball control and touch. Since it is a new phenomenon, Dr. Wu has coined the word jumpulse to denote a sudden change of force.
19. Prof. Ram: Why is the solution to touch so difficult and why does it require perception ?
20. Dr. Ching: As inventors, Dr. Wu, Dr. Kunii, and I have to think physically what is involved in the phenomenon of touch. There are actually three conditions to be satisfied to achieve touch, or bounceless collision. The first condition is the application of jumpulse, which by itself is hard for most people to visualize physically. The second condition is the development of a feedback effect that prolonged contact further enhances prolonged contact, at the exact moment of impact. Jumpulse occurs in an extremely short period of time; it has to occur within a very short period of time of an impulse. However, if prolonged contact starts as a result of the feedback effect, the contact time can be extended to a humanly possible time. The third condition is that the application of jumpulse must be at the precise time with precise amount to achieve the feedback effect in the second condition.
21. Dr. Kunii: The solution of touch is difficult to think and will also be difficult to achieve experimentally without a thorough understanding of the solution. The construction of devices with the ability to touch should be guided by the analytic solution to touch.
22. Prof. Ram: Would you please explain the precise physical phenomenon of jumpulse so that any non-physicist can understand.
23. Dr. Ching: We can think the physical picture in terms of a ball impacting a racket. We need to think in slow motion and look into what happened microscopically during impact. Both the ball and the racket act as springs which are indented during impact. The spring force will push the ball out of the racket after the contact. What we need to do is to prevent the spring force from pushing the ball out of the racket. In touch, the ball and the racket are replaced by the finger and the object to be touched. We want to find out how do humans, animals, and insects achieve such a subtle movement that no robot in the world today can achieve.
24. Dr. Kunii: Something complex is going on during the impact that allow us to touch. Hitting a ball with a racket is simply an extension of touch. Professional athletes are endowed with the ability beyond the ability of an average human, who can only touch with their hands and feet, not with a racket , a club or a bat.
25. Dr. Ching: In order to think ball control or bounceless collision, we need to extract from the complex phenomenon of collision only the essential elements. Generally, the phenomenon of collision can be described by the interaction of two objects separated by a spring, not necessarily connected. Without active force, the spring will push the ball out eventually. Let us imaging that the ball and the spring are fully indented and ready to expand into its normal shape. At this moment, the ball "feels" a force trying to push it out of the racket. Also, let us imaging that the ball and racket at this moment of maximum contact are both at a full stop, that is that both have zero velocity. Without any external influence, the ball will start to increase in velocity in the opposite direction from the direction in which it has been moving before the maximum contact.
26. Dr. Kunii: We have arrived at the pivotal moment. I guess that the description cannot be any simpler without losing key elements. It is probably also important to point out here that no matter what material is used for the ball or the racket, they will always produce the spring force which Dr. Ching described in his simple physical description. In other words, robot touch does not depend on the material used for the finger, unless the material can produce the same effect as that Dr. Ching is explaining.
27. Prof. Ram: This is a very acute observation and should be undeniable to all physicists. Here the layman must listen to the physicist. So, there is still some use for physicists. My undergraduate degree was in physics. The phenomenon of ball control has to be explainable by teachers of physical education and robotics. Many of these teachers are not physicists. I believe that it is not time wasted to explain the phenomenon of ball control or touch as carefully and in as much detail as possible, and with all our interruptions to further clarify the explanation.
28. Dr. Ching: Please feel free to interrupt, especially, at this critical moment of maximum contact. By the way, Herich Hertz solved the static problem for contact. Jumpulse addresses the dynamic problem of contact. There were huge volumes of books written after him on the contact problem. However, the emphasis in physics later switched to the study of wave motion. I believe that the contact problem is just as important, if not more important, to physics because of its relevance to the creation of robots which can replace all human physical labors.
29. Prof. Ram: Please continue the explanation of ball control, of which the WuKuniiChing Team has a consensus.
30. Dr. Ching: At the moment of maximum contact, the ball comes to a full stop and feels a force pushing it out of the racket. The ball will start to gain velocity moving outward. If the ball acquired any velocity without active external intervention, the phenomenon can become quite complex to think physically. So, we freeze time and keep the ball at zero velocity, within our mind. Even at zero velocity, the ball cannot stand still; it will accelerate to a finite velocity. To maintain prolonged contact, the racket must move with the same velocity as the ball. To achieve this same velocity, the racket must have the same acceleration. Here, it is interesting, and subtle when visualized precisely, that the ball is being pushed out by the racket, which must try to catch up with the ball with the same velocity. To achieve the same velocity means to have the same acceleration. To achieve the same acceleration, the racket must suddenly acquire the finite acceleration of the ball. A new force must be added to the racket to achieve the acceleration. The sudden change of force is called jumpulse, which is applied to the racket.
31. Prof. Ram: Please help us to see the phenomenon once more and summarize your explanation.
32. Dr. Ching: The racket is simultaneously pushing the ball and chasing the ball. The ball and the racket interact only through the spring between them; the ball does not directly experiencing the new force applied on the racket. As long as the spring is indented for the same amount, the ball experiences the same force. What is done to the racket can affect the ball only through the spring. In ball control, the ball, even when it is moving, experiences the same constant force from the racket. Physically, both Dr. Wu, Dr. Kunii, and I must think two phenomena, one for the ball and the other for the racket, simultaneously, sort like a time-sharing of the mind to check what is happening to the ball at one moment, and then what happened to the racket. This type of "self-centered" thinking, ignoring most other considerations, is necessary to confirm that the phenomenon of prolonged contact can really exist.
33. Prof. Ram: So, the key point, which all the teachers of ball control or touch must keep clearly in mind, is that the ball and the racket interact only through the spring. The "trick" is to move the ball and the racket at the same velocity with whatever forces are necessary.
34. Dr. Kunii: We must isolate the problem to a few essential factors. The main factor is the spring. Newton and Robert Hooke were intellectual rivals, and Hooke was the authority on spring force. Hooke can now claim some small confirmation in his critical views of Newton.
35. Dr. Ching: It is interesting to note that Dr. Wu and I thought exactly the same way, when I went to Taiwan to hear his explanation. Physical thinking is very sloppy, but is necessary for discovering new phenomena.
36. Dr. Kunii: In physics terms, jumpulse indicates a sudden shift from an inertia frame, which moves with zero or constant velocity, to an accelerating frame, which moves with an acceleration. In an accelerating frame, the ball experiences an inertia force due to its finite mass. Ball control or prolonged contact occurs because the inertia force and the spring force are in balance. Once the new concept of jumpulse goes into physics textbooks, this will be the way which teachers will teach it and students will memorize it.
37. Prof. Ram: Now we see the feasibility of prolonged contact by applying a jumpulse. Please explain the other two factors necessary in prolonged contact.
38. Dr. Ching: The first factor is the precise timing. The player has the short time duration of the impulse, between the initial contact of the ball to the point of final separation, to apply the jumpulse. Since in our case both the ball and the racket are stationary at the moment of maximum contact or indentation, we are dealing with a much shorter time, namely, the very short moment near the maximum contact. The sudden change of force in jumpulse occurs in a even shorter time than the time duration when the jumpulse is applied, which is shorter than the time duration for the impulse.
39. Prof. Ram: It sounds like that to catch this very short time duration to apply jumpulse is humanly impossible.
40. Dr. Ching: All the professional athletes can and must be able to do it. The reason that prolonged contact can occur often is that once the process of prolonged contact starts just a little bit, the prolonged period will give the player the additional time to adjust to create the effect of prolonged contact. It is the third factor in ball control. It is a feedback effect. In physics it is called a resonance effect which reduces the frequency of the collision to zero or the period to infinity. To find the optimal pattern of jumpulses or the ideal force function requires further study.
41. Prof. Ram: Touch should be even more relevant to ball control. For example, it is relevant to spacecraft docking or landing, aircraft landing, active bounceless shock absorbers for cars, etc. would you please also describe the mechanism of touch ?
42. Dr. Ching: Touch, unlike ball control, has to occur within a very short distance, as well as a very short time. In touching, when the finger is indented by the surface it tries to touch, a repellent spring force is exerted on the finger. Without any active force applied, the finger would bounce off the surface as a ball bounces off a racket. Generally, a touch can be performed with two or more jumpulses. For example, a jumpulse is applied to the finger when the finger and the surface are in contact to reduce repellent spring force, and another jumpulse is applied to the finger when the motion of the contact surface reaches zero velocity to completely balance the repellent spring force. Either jumpulse can be positive or negative in direction.
43. Prof. Ram: What is the unit for jumpulse ?
44. Dr. Ching: The unit for jumpulse is the same as newton. To honor Dr. Wu, the unit of jumpulse is wu, which also stands for weight unit. One wu equals one newton.
45. Prof. Ram: Intelligence and knowledge contribution are not always proportional to each other. Knowledge contribution needs a balanced intelligence. The solution to touch and ball control needs a very balanced intelligence. In your opinion, Dr. Ching, how will Dr. Wu be remembered in history ?
46. Dr. Ching: Since jumpulse will be needed in the construction of robots which can replace all human physical labor, Dr. Ta-You Wu will be recognized, when we start to construct robots in, say, a millennium, as the greatest Chinese scientist ever lived and the real Father Of Robotics. The ability to think ball control or touch will always be a challenge to all scientists. In the beginning, every time I tried to reconstruct the physical phenomenon of ball control in my mind, it would take away my half day's mental energy. The problem involve 25 variables. It involves two masses on each side of the spring interacting through the spring. There are five variables, mass, time, two positions, and the spring constant, to consider on each side. Their permutation is, five times five, equal to twenty-five. Most problems in physics involve about only five variables. Ball control can be achieved with one jumpulse, and touch requires generally two jumpulses.
47. Dr. Kunii: Even though the problem of touch is difficult to think by most people, it is a problem mankind must face because of its extraordinarily wide range of applications. For example, it is needed in the coming 2008 Olympics held in Beijing China, where Dr. Wu grew up. All racket sports and even those involve hands of feet, which act as rackets, depend on ball control for consistency. Even my favorite sports, skiing and marshal arts, can benefit from jumpulse. In addition to making general purpose robots which can touch, the concept of jumpulse can help us make bounceless cars. Today, unable to construct the bounceless shock absorbing system for cars, we have to spend trillion dollars to build perfectly flat roads. London insurance companies refuse to insure spacecraft docking because of the unsolved problem of soft landing or docking, or of touch. Three out of four Mar's landing ended in disasters, and finally we had to resort to bounced landing. I would strongly recommend that we solve the problem of touch before we do widespread space exploration.
48. Dr. Ching: It is a simple vision of the future that all human physical labor can be done by robots. Without robots, which should be defined by the main constrain in their construction, namely, the ability to touch, human beings must temporarily be substituted for robots in physical labors. In the future world of robots, humans will only do programming, with permanent, not temporary, software to instruct the robots to do all physical labor. We would then have a full employment, because permanent software has no technical barrier in its usage; everyone can program immediately and can have a job as a programmer. The smart programmers will program robots on complex projects, and the less intelligent will program robots on the simpler projects for robots to do. When we have too much work, or over-employment, more robots will be constructed, which will also be done by robots. The programmers who program the construction of the self-manufacturing general purpose robots will be the forerunner of life scientists. Their work will ultimately leads to the programming of DNA, which is the ultimate permanent software system.
49. Prof. Ram: Thank you, Dr. Ching. We now fully see the significant historical position of Dr. Ta-You Wu. His spirit in heaven will be thankful to you and Dr. Kunii, and the world will be grateful to him for his contribution to knowledge.
50. Dr. Ching: The completely automated manufacturing process of the future based on permanent software and robots must also use Dr. Kunii's pioneering work in computer graphics. The currently prevailing computer graphics based on triangulation must be replaced by the more general homotopy theory introduced by Dr. Kunii because at high resolution, the amount of data for triangulation will simply become prohibitive. Also, I believe that Prof. Ram will be instrumental in bringing the current generation of computer scientists, who are trained in software engineering, a field Prof. Ram pioneered, into permanent software, which he is the first to understand both in terms of its technology and its merits.
51. Prof. Souza: What is homotopy theory ? What is the relationship between software engineering and Universal Permanent Software ?
52. Dr. Ching: Homotopy theory is more advanced than graph theory based on topology in terms of invariant properties. The conservation of the invariance reduces the resources needed to describe a graph. Most people are familiar with pixels, which are points, lines, such as used in Computer Aided Design and Postscript graphic language, and triangulation, which extends the one dimensional lines to the description of two and three dimensional objects. Graph theory based on topology can be considered the generalized theory for graphics and is based on coordinates and their transformations. Homotopy theory extends topology with more invariance in order to study objects mainly in three dimensions and four dimensions, where time is the fourth dimension.
53. Prof. Lee: I learn Universal Permanent Software in post-science. It is a completely automated software, which can self-generate, auto-update and auto-document. Another thing I learn in post-science is that engineering today deals with temporary creations, while permanent software is permanent through mainly auto-update. Creations of nature are all permanent.
54. Dr. Ching: Software engineering is a new field encompasses all the CASE tools. CASE stands for Computer Aided System Engineering, which attempts to apply engineering methods to software programming. As in the past, technicians moved up to engineers, and today software programmer will become software engineers. CASE introduces many new methods and concepts to software programming, but did not move in the direction of complete automation, which John von Neuman tried but did not succeed. Most CASE tool tries to make programming simpler for human beings, the users of computer. Universal Permanent Software tries to strike a balance between friendliness to the computer and to the human user, since computing involves two partners, the computer and the human. Being the founder of software engineering, Prof. Ram is in the best position to judge and guide the development and the implementation of permanent software.
55. Prof. Souza: What is the relationship between science and post-science ?
56. Dr. Ching: From the point of view of post-science, Dr. Wu should be the first person to be discussed, because science is the starting, not the end, point of post-science. Post-science rests on the foundation of rigor and certainty of human knowledge which are created and demonstrated by science. Post-science surpasses science in both complexity and rigor. Science deals with problems involving about five variables and accepts empirical verification as proof of correctness. In post-science, some problems in social science have over fifty variables and require mathematical rigor because the solutions are not empirically verifiable, such as prices, decisions, or plans. Post-science problems in life science have around five hundred variables, such as all the choices in the machine instruction set which is used in the completely automated software.
57. Dr. Kunii: Would you please define for us again what is post-science ?
58. Dr. Ching: Post-Science is knowledge beyond physical science, dealing mainly with social and life sciences. It currently contains the solutions to touch, value, and complete automated software. These solutions are disclosed in my book Table Tennis Scientific Analyses, Dr. Wu's paper on impulsive motion, and in the patents "Quantitative Supply And Demand Model Based On Infinite Spreadsheet" (Pat. No. 6,078,901) and "Completely Automated And Self-generated Software System" (Pat. No. 5,485,601). The ultimate goal of post-science is to achieve mankind's self-creation.
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