[video] triple ball stack balance

[peterbone]

I balance a ball on a ball on a ball in my hand for 11 seconds. It took me years to learn this. Now to simultaneously solve a cube in my free hand!

 

[Mike Hughey]

Very very impressive! The 360 with two balls is awesome too.

 

[PandaCuber]

Niceee

 

[CarlBrannen]

Loved it! And liked the drawing at the end. If you're interested in some more complicated figures, I can probably give some tips as discrete symmetries are a favorite subject. The more interesting ones have handedness, that is, the pieces, when assembled, give a figure that is either left or right handed.

 

[peterbone]

Loved it! And liked the drawing at the end. If you're interested in some more complicated figures, I can probably give some tips as discrete symmetries are a favorite subject. The more interesting ones have handedness, that is, the pieces, when assembled, give a figure that is either left or right handed.

That's interesting. I searched online for good patterns I could put on a ball but found very little. Do you have links? One idea I had was was to put points evenly over the ball in a geodesic grid and then join them in a continuous line with the travelling salesman problem. However the tsp seems non trivial on a sphere. The pattern helps a lot with the visual feedback of the trick.

 

[Ickathu]

Wait, so are these actual spheres, or do they have a physical grid/honey comb type thing on the outside for the other ball to balance on easier?

 

[peterbone]

Wait, so are these actual spheres, or do they have a physical grid/honey comb type thing on the outside for the other ball to balance on easier?

They're spheres. The geodesic grid is just drawn on, as you can see at the end of the video. The grid just means that I can see the ball rotating which helps with visual feedback so that I can more quickly correct for misalignment of the balls. Some people do this trick using balls with flattened surfaces, which makes it much easier. I know of only one other video showing someone doing it without cheating, but this was filmed in 1936.
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/rabello-juggling-wizardry

Some of you may be interested in an earlier video I made. This shows a machine learning algorithm I wrote which learns the 3 ball stacked balance using a genetic algorithm and neural network controller (but only in 2 dimensions).

 

[ben1996123]

Wow, cool. That song also reminded me of this thread from over 3 years ago too