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posted by
martyb
on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:01AM
from the if-it-walks-like-a-duck,-sinks-like-a-duck,-oh,-wait... dept.
from the if-it-walks-like-a-duck,-sinks-like-a-duck,-oh,-wait... dept.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
The duck boat that sank in a Missouri lake last week, killing 17 people, was built based on a design by a self-taught entrepreneur who had no engineering training, according to court records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.
The designer, entrepreneur Robert McDowell, completed only two years of college and had no background, training or certification in mechanics when he came up with the design for "stretch" duck boats more than two decades ago, according to a lawsuit filed over a roadway disaster in Seattle involving a similar duck boat in 2015.
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Duck Boat in Missouri Disaster was Designed by Entrepreneur With no Engineering Training
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(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday July 26 2018, @11:11PM
Oh I forgot to mention the real allure for an NN based control system or at least what I noticed and thought was absolutely remarkable as a lay person trying to understand them.
The process for creating a control system with NN is to setup the model with inputs from the controlled process during the learning phase. Examples of normal operating behavior are fed into the system and the NN begins training and refinement to get to it's approximation of producing a system that doesn't dump chemicals on the floor.
After you feed it enough training data you can then rearrange the neural network using a formally defined process and now the trained network can receive inputs from the controlled system and produce outputs to control it. Run that in a simulation to find out when it let the pressure in a pipe get to 85k PSI, it blew up and killed someone then go back into training mode and teach it that is bad, bad network, bad.
The allure seems to be that you can do this with the known transformation of the NN from learning mode to control mode so that you don't have to actually produce dynamics models and all that. That sounds like a much easier task to me than building a formal or optimal control system.
I also think it's rather insane for anything with higher stakes than a video game.