Idea: Night vision shorter then day vision?

Why wouldn't they need it? I can't imagine a robot, no matter how sophisticated, that has better vision than a human.

You really don't understand the concept of an abstraction do you?

Your imagination is rather crippled bmb.

Do you honestly think that Humans have GOOD eyesight? We're slightly above average at best... and our other senses have suffered for it.

It seems your understanding of vision is what is crippled. One of the things that physically stands out from most animals is our excellent eyesight. With greater definition, better colours and depth perception. While some creatures outdo us in colours and some certainly outdo us in definition the overall balance between these elements is the best of the best.

And don't get me started on machine vision. Digital cameras suck, especially in the dark, and will always suck and algorithms for interpreting visual inputs are extremely complex and very poor even compared to a newborn.

So if you want to say "they can't see very well because they're robots" then that is a fine thing to say to justify limited vision ranges at night.

They can see well because they don't NEED to use just the visual part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

They have Radio to Gamma, 1000m to 0.1 Ångströms. We've got 400 to 700 nanometers.

Robots can "see" things we can't even imagine.

Apparently you can't even imagine, that they can see things we can't imagine.

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And no, Human vision is not THAT amazing.
As great apes we're good with colours.
Movement? There are animals that see that, better.
Distance and Resolution? Many birds can see much further and more detailed than we can.
Field of View? Humans are rather forward focused. Our peripheral vision isn't very good.
Some reptiles can see Infrared.
Many Insects can see Ultraviolet.

I point you towards the Mantis Shrimp... owner of the most complex pair of eyes known in the animal kingdom. A Crustacean has a more advanced set of eyes than you do bmb, with twelve distinct colour receptors... vs our three, and the ability to see polarised light and UV. Not bad for a 30cm long Stomatopoda

Oh, so it seems that in addition to ignoring anything he 'can't imagine' from the field of Physics, bmb also disregards most of mainstream biology and engineering. And when someone posts sources to prove him wrong he'll just say that it's "off topic", since apparently the only thing that's on topic in his eyes is "agreeing with bmb".

I could argue this, but it would be a fruitless endeavour, so instead I'll post an image from NASA showing the Orion constellation in both the visual and the infra-red spectrum. The image on the left is actually a considerably better image than any human eye could capture, but for comparison purposes let's pretend it's what a human sees. The image on the right will blow bmb's mind. He can't comprehend it. It's things that a human cannot see. A camera is capable of perceiving things bmb cannot even imagine.

That's probably an hours long exposure with filters of limited utility to only a few non-visible spectra they specifically wanted to study here. Not to mention the telescope is purposebuilt for seeing stars and is useless for anything else.

You try taking a more general purpose capture device and giving it a fraction of a seconds exposure and we'll see how much of orion you can see.

All things are not equal here.

The end point of the discussion is your skewed perspective of science is not related to what makes sense in the game.

Skewed perspective of science? You mean what's actually true as compared to what is made up in bmb's head?

You posit that you can't imagine Robots having better vision than us.
We posit that your imagination is stunted at best.

Humans have crappy night vision. What did we do? We made Night Vision Goggles.
Hyper intelligent AI Robots have crappy night vision (apparently). What did they do according to bmb?..

Roll over an accept it.

:roll:

And it's a well known fact that electronic technology never gets orders of magnitude better when given time and a military incentive to do so, oh wait that's exactly what happened. If you were born in the 20s you'd probably say that you couldn't imagine a calculating machine that's better than a human, in furiously written telegrams to newspapers. But I guess we'd better call the whole game off since I bet bmb can't imagine armies being built in seconds from trees, rocks and dirt.

And, bonus round:

None of these images are* even possible. They don't exist because bmb doesn't believe in imaging techniques not possessed by humans. Annoyingly I didn't match up those sentence lengths properly and I didn't want to reuse imaging techniques, but whatever. Clearly a squishy ball of jelly capable of resolving a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum at a fixed zoom and field of view with only four types of photoreceptors and a tiny area of good spatial resolution is "best" for giant robot battles.

*Note, this one doesn't look that impressive. It is however a picture of the Sun. Taken from a few hundred meters underground.

bmb, look at this photo:

Now, tell me where this walrus is hottest.

Look at this wonderful photo taken by a machine:


Also, look at this image:

Count the trees in the bottom 2/3rd of the image.

Then look at this image:


Which, do you feel, is clearer?

Humans can't see all that well, compared to what machines can do. There are IR and night vision cameras with higher FPS and resolution than the human eye.

And this is even puny human technology, invented in the past 200 years. Imagine what thousands of years would do.

I can't imagine one today.

There we have it folks. bmb admits his imagination is completely disconnected from reality by denying the existence of the very device he uses to make that denial.

Remember when this thread was about whether robots could see at night or not, and more importantly should be able to for the purposes of the game?

Looks like it didn't take very long for my prediction to come true. Your problem, bmb, is that you insist on such crazy ideas that the moment you post, the topic "why bmb is wrong" becomes so much more interesting than whatever we were discussing previously.

EDIT: Because it's not worth bumping the thread over bmb's response to this, I need only point the reader to the evidence posted by his detractors, myself included already contained within this thread. There are quite a few images.

Thats funny because you only ever posted opinions with no sources.

thapear: try to take a picture of something with the sun directly in the picture frame, with a digital camera (robot) and see how nice picture you get. I dont think robots today have the same dynamic vision range like people. Anyway I dont think it is completely wrong to say that robots will have an disadvantage when aiming directly against the sun.

And guys, this is a game. It's ok to have different views.

snierke

If we can build machines which can produce images to allow us to better see things, then surely those machines have data that is better than what we see.

Are you seriously comparing a modern visual light commercial digital camera to some futuretech optics possessed by a giant death robot? It can just switch to a band outside of the middle of the Sun's emission curve, or use sensor data transmitted from other machines, or deploy some kind of digitally switched mirror array (a currently commercially available technology, mind you) to block out the Sun. Or specific-wavelength active scanning at holes in the Sun's emission curve. If they're inconvenienced by something as minor as the Sun, with the energy outputs available to them, constructing sensor-blinding apparatus of equivalent power is pretty trivial so you may as well apply the "aiming into the sun" penalty all the time for simplicity.

Irony, thy name is bmb. There are more than enough sources.

It is possible to try fun things with a planet's dark side. But that is more suited to map design than as a base part of the game.

Exactly, for all we know they are seeing gamma rays, smelling xrays, and hearing dark matter.

thousands upon thousands of years of technology development. We can fluff whatever the hell we want to fluff.* /end silly discussion.

I would also like to say again that radar would not suffer from this vision effect, so it might be more of a limited design idea than it seems, but at the same time, if you don't have radar up, or if radar is expensive, or very short range, then it might be a pretty good idea.


*Disclaimer: by "whatever the hell we want to fluff," include the phrase "within physical limits so physicist game junkies don't blow a gasket."