Lab notebook
The blog tells the story; these are the notes underneath it. Each work log covers one stretch of training, run by run: why I started it, what changed, what the videos showed and what it cost. Some went into a post, some haven't yet, and some were dead ends. Everything I've paid for is in one of them.
24 work logs · 195 training runs · about 294 machine-hours · $282 in all
Foundations
- The muscle body: muscles instead of joint motorsStill going
An experiment I asked for: drive the fighter with 86 joint muscles instead of servos, and measure how much longer the stance takes to learn, if it can be learnt at all.
- The higher guard: retraining every skill onto a new stance
Eighteen runs that moved every skill onto a higher guard, fixed the lead hook and the jab, and produced guard18-124.5M, the base every clone starts from.
- Fast stepping and the step-jab (abandoned)Abandoned
Twenty-six short GPU runs on fast steps in and out of range and a jab that steps in. The long step never pushed off the back leg, and the work was stopped to redo the motion capture.
- Run by run: walking in the stance
Every run behind the post, with its outcome, machines and cost.
- Run by run: balancing in the stance
Every run behind the post, with its outcome, machines and cost.
Techniques
- Teachers: the kicksStill going
Low, mid and high roundhouses on both sides, from my motion capture: the first teachers, and the next round prepared.
- Teacher: the dash
Six runs to a dash teacher: a quick push-off in any direction, upright, without squatting, over the distances I would really cover.
- Teachers: the elbowsStill going
Two elbow teachers from my motion capture: the right elbow to the chin and the stepping left elbow.
- Teachers: the uppercuts, second round
Four more uppercut teachers: the rear one kept facing square, the lead one still turned or staggered until its feet were held down.
- Teacher: the rear knee, landing upright
One more rear-knee teacher, so the knee lands upright instead of arched back.
- Teachers: the uppercuts over distance
Two uppercut teachers trained in parallel on RunPod. The rear one was kept; the lead one turned 90° after the punch, which traced back to how training rewarded facing.
- Teachers: slips, rolls and the lean back
Nine evasion teachers in two rounds of four parallel boxes. They passed the gate and failed on video: rushed by the punch clock, then bent by an edited reference.
- Teacher: the pull counter
One run on RunPod after four vast.ai boxes never loaded: a lean back and a rear straight to the head, 8/8 in the air and at the bag.
- Teacher: the rear straight to the body
Four runs to a body-straight teacher: a no-low-blow line, the bag at the impact point, then a retrain on the base's slower elbows.
- Teachers: the rear knee and the switch knee
Two knee teachers trained side by side, three runs each: the knees landed first time, the feet and the steps home took two more.
- Run by run: blocking
Every run behind the post, with its outcome, machines and cost.
- Run by run: faster punches
Every run behind the post, with its outcome, machines and cost.
- Run by run: five punches
Every run behind the post, with its outcome, machines and cost.
- Run by run: the jab
Every run behind the post, with its outcome, machines and cost.
Students
- Distillation: distill7 and distill8Still going
Two more students: the uppercuts over distance and the upright knee in distill7, then the elbows in distill8.
- Distillation: six runs to the student distill4
Distilling the body straight, both knees and the pull counter into the base: what each run changed, how the gate picked the student, and what it cost to evaluate.
Infrastructure
- Machines that trained nothing: renders and tests
The rented machines that were not training a model: Blender renders for the shadow-clones video and tests of the RunPod launcher.
- Run by run: two fighters, GPU against CPU
Every run behind the post, with its outcome, machines and cost.
- Run by run: GPU against CPU
Every run behind the post, with its outcome, machines and cost.
Not sorted yet
Runs and machines that no work log covers yet ($0.01): newer than the last update of this notebook. They are counted in the totals and on the Stats page all the same.