In the beginning...

Tickled my fancy :-)

BHR-3 - Another tai chi robot

Yet another humanoid robot using tai chi to showcase its anatomical abilities. Clearly the developers of these robots are looking to show them off as best as possible, and so it is interesting that they choose tai chi to demonstrate their mobile prowess.

I wonder if this is because of people's natural ability to recognise "gracefulness"? After all, it is quite hard to pin down what makes one person's tai chi good or not, as it is all about recognising the subtlety and  coordination. For people who don't do tai chi, this is all done at a subconscious level and our training in the art is trying to move this recognition from subconscious to conscious to be able to manifest it in ourselves.

Some other links to BHR-3 information:

http://www.plasticpals.com/?p=28937

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/12/bhr-3-humanoid-robot/

Samurai Umbrella

An ideal christmas present :-) The Samuari Umbrella:

Good vs Evil Ninja

The difference between hard and soft styles :-) Courtesy of Commissioned Comic.

Controlled falling the robotic way

When teaching beginners to move in Tai chi, one of the first exercises to do is tai chi walking. This is where each step is taken by first place the foot and then transferring the weight, so that any time you can stop or reverse the action. This is different to normal walking which is called "controlled falling". This controlled falling type of motion is perfectly embodied by this new robotic walker, that can walk for up to 13 hours without any motors or active control!



The energy efficiency of controlled falling is exactly why we normally use it in daily life. However in tai chi terms, what you sacrifice is stability i.e. it would be very easy to trip this robot up. Robots are therefore evolving from a more stable "tai chi" like way of moving, into a more dynamically unstable "normal" way of moving. Ironic then that as humans we're trying to move the other way. Could it be that robots are just naturally better at tai chi*?


* Probably not :-)

Embrace science to set the chi free

For over a decade I struggled with chi. I wanted to believe it existed, but I knew scientifically that it could not. This dilemma vexed me, as I believe it currently vexes an extremely large number of scientifically minded (i.e. most Westerners) internal art practitioners worldwide. Perhaps ignorance is bliss, so if you believe in chi I say good luck to you, but just like religion, you can not make someone believe through rational argument.

The fact that I didn't believe in chi always made me feel guilty, I worried about it and tried to believe (honestly I did) out of respect for my teachers and my teacher's teachers. Fortunately, I feel I have resolved this dichotomy and internal conflict through my musings, and writings, which is a frankly a great weight off my mind. What makes me so happy is that what I have come up with both respects the traditional teaching and at the same time embraces science. It is a definition that I think is beautiful. But more than beautiful, beautiful in the way Richard Freynman means it (video):



What really opens the door to this way of thinking is the appreciation that consciousness, intelligence and mind are but the tip of the iceberg (just as neuroscience teaches us). The human body is made up of billions of neurons and nerves, each one of which is effectively a tiny sensor acting on the environment around us and also inside us. As we go up the consciousness hierarchy these sensors are grouped together into things we ordinarily call sensations, feelings, emotions, instincts, intuition and awareness. It is impossible to be able to process every neuron at the conscious level, we have to accept the emergent nature of ourselves and try to listen to our body, our feelings and our emotions. The philosophy of Enlightenment if you will (swapping my Westerner dictionary for my Eastern one for a moment).

That bottom-up way of thinking is complemented by the top down view. How does one command the body? Just as we cannot perceive an individual neuron, neither can we consciously command it. The body does not understand logic, language or conceptualisation. We can not talk to the body using syntax and grammar. We talk to the body using visualisation and feelings. If you imagine yourself performing an action, you will get better performing it. If you imagine yourself being happy, you will become happier. This visualisation and concentration is a core part of traditional meditation and tai chi teaching and in the latter is called yi/shen (translated as "mind intent").

So back to chi

Chi is not energy. A fact that I think should be almost indisputable. [Before anyone of a traditional background objects, please note  it is not for me to prove that it doesn't, it is for you to prove that it does. After all, if I claim that pigs can fly, the onus is not on you to prove that they don't, but on me to prove that they do. In the centuries that chi as a concept has existed, no experiment has yet been devised to prove its existence, a fact which I think speaks for itself.]

Chi is not energy, but do not despair traditional reader, I am not dismissing it out of hand like some arrogant philistine. Chi is an incredibly sophisticated visualisation framework (in the top down sense). It also does indeed feel like there is an "energy" inside you if you truly listen to your body and practice hard (bottom up sense). The crucial distinction is that there is a difference between what something feels like, and what is actually there. In scientific terms, chi is not energy, but in practical terms if you actually start paying attention to your body it feels as if it is.

This is a beautiful realisation (at least to me). What it means is that the full body of literature and teachings on controlling and directing chi is valid and useful, as it directly corresponds to how things feel. It is not wrong, and I can look my teachers in the eye again, as it is just a way of describing a feeling or emotion, like any other. At the same time, although the model is entirely valid and extremely useful, it is subjective, and so there is no need for chi to actually be energy in reality, and science breaths a sign of relief. Let me draw an analogy here - consider love:

Q: Can I devise a scientific experiment to measure “love energy” directly?
A: No.

Q: Is love a way of describing an internal subjective sensation using a common language to exchange ideas and thoughts about feelings and emotions?
A: Yes.

Q: Does love actually exist?
A: No.

Q: Do I feel like it does, so it doesn’t matter anyway?
A: Yes.

So there it is, when you deal with other people, the better the interaction is, the more love you feel. Perhaps a better word for love is the Buddhist concept of metta (i.e. loving kindness), along with it's allegory, hate. The better your interaction is with yourself, the more chi you feel, and of course it's allegory is pain. Chi is not energy - it is an emotion, a feeling, a sensation - a realisation that rather than invalidating it, emancipates it. After all emotions may not exist in a pure physical sense, but they certainly have real world effects. Love is about society and relationships. Chi is about internal physiology and well-being. Love and chi are in a sense the same thing but in different contexts. It cannot be a coincidence that they both originate in the gut.

The chi thought experiment

I thought I would share my little thought experiment to explain why I believe that chi is efficiency and not energy. To do this I'm going to use my robotics framework, and the scientific mechanism of describing a simplified model of the real world in order to aid understanding. So, consider this little diagram below:

This picture represents a 2D model of Tai Chi, and chi. What we have is a little robot (as an approximation to a human) standing on the ground and pushing against a spring. This robot has four different joints connected together by linkages, and the question is how much force can this little robot issue into the spring? We also assume that this that there is infinite friction between the robot's "foot" and the ground, to remove any complications to do with grip (or rooting).

In this diagram I also represents the concept of total (scientific) energy available, as the big bucket filled with water. Humans have only a finite amount of chemical energy available to them that they can transform into muscular force. This is the classical scientific view of energy, which can transform stored chemical energy (glucose) into a force on the spring (pressure). To model this transformation, connected to this bucket are a series of hosepipes and taps that go to each of the joints, so that the joints of the robot are controlled by hydraulics. The question now is how do I distribute the total amount of hydraulic pressure available across the different joints in order to achieve the maximum force into the spring? This can be solved mathematically (which I leave as an exercise for the reader :-). Intuitively however it is likely that the optimal structure is, an arrangement whereby the linkages of the robot form a classic arch, just as has been used for thousands of years in civil engineering.


To my mind therefore doing Tai Chi is akin to solving this problem. If we can distribute our available glucose energy throughout the joints of the body optimally, that will be the maximum force we can issue. How much chi we have therefore is equivalent to how optimally we transfer force across the joints of the body. This is commonly referred to as maintaining "your structure", "correct body alignment" and "whole body coordination". The better we are at utilising every possible joint and muscle, the more effective we will be at issuing force. Chi is therefore a measure of how efficient and effective we are at solving this complex optimisation problem instinctively. No one actually solves a complex optimisation problem mathematically in real-time of course, what we do is use the feelings and sensations from within our own body to "just do it". In Chinese parlance we call these sensations "feeling that chi".

The alternative, and in fact mainstream, view of chi, is that it is a mystical energy force which I represent in the following diagram:

This diagram assumes that there is an additional chi energy that we can use to add force to the spring. This chi energy does not conform to the most fundamental physical laws in science: the conservation of energy. If it did, it would go into the original bucket. I do not believe this can possibly be true, as this would represent the most profound and fundamental revolution of our entire scientific knowledge base. Amazing claims require amazing proof, and there is no amazing proof. Frankly there isn't even any weak and feeble proof. Unfortunately however it is impossible to prove a negative, so you cannot prove that the second model is incorrect, but I defer to Occam's Razor :-)

I do believe that the concept of "chi" is useful. It is a powerful way to visualise how things feel inside the body. All we have are feelings and it is perfectly valid to feel as if chi is flowing, even if it doesn't exist. After all, we are happy to visualise things like "extending our roots into the ground like a tree", but no one in their right mind would claim that we actually have roots, and understand it is just a metaphor. Chi is an incredibly powerful visualisation metaphor, and mastering these feelings of chi is fundamental to achieving mastery of the internal arts. It is of course important to realise that there is a distinction between how things feel and how things are. Chi is not energy it is a feeling.