Bullwhips can be used in the right way. There is a whip performer. She can play a game with a whip.
A scientist at Northeastern University in Boston said that scientists don't understand whip cracking. Most people are good at handling complex objects because of their many ways of moving.
Aldo Faisal is an artificial intelligence researcher and neuroscience professor at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Human tasks like tying shoelaces and folding towels can be difficult to understand by machines. He said that seeing humans handle floppy objects, such as whips, could give engineers insight into how to fix robot weaknesses.
The team in Dr. Sternad's lab studied how whips move and how people handle them.
The whip can move in many different ways.
A graduate student at Northeastern and a neuroscientist worked on a project to create a flexible object.
16 people were recruited to watch them whip. The team rigged up a bullwhip with motion capture markers and removed the whip's popper, which was responsible for its loud noise.
Scientists watched them crack the whip. The researcher moved the whip behind the body, overhead and to the front of the target. The volunteers did individual whip movements and continuous ones, aiming at their targets repeatedly so that their motions took on a rhythm. They did a number of throws for each style.
The whippers had their hand positions mapped by the researchers. Many participants didn't hit the target even 30 percent of the time, and individuals' approaches ranged widely. The scientists reported a few trends in the Royal Society Open Science.
People perform better with individual throws. There was a key moment when participants brought the whips behind them. The less error a throw tends to have, the quicker a whipper's hand moves. The motion of the whip can be simplified. The whip has less time to entangle if you speed it up.
The paper looked at people's motions and how energy is transferred to the whip.
She said that the crack that the team demonstrated, one described in a textbook, wasn't the best one for volunteers to use. Cattleman's Crack is used for whip performers. With that technique, the hand moves up and down, keeping the whip mostly in a vertical plane. When you crack it, you want to keep as much linear motion as you can. She hit 10 targets with a whip in 2.54 seconds.
If they had filmed people at different levels of expertise, they might have seen different whip and hand motions. Adam Winrich was recorded before this study. He hit about 90 percent of targets in the lab, according to the team. The team hadn't yet figured out how to capture his whip.
The researchers may be able to observe how their strategy changes if they follow people practicing this task for a longer period of time. The doctor would have been curious to see how people learned to whip.
The scientists have begun doing that. Participants are going to be brought into the lab for 20 sessions of whip cracking. Even in 20 days, our subjects don't look like April Choi.
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