AI assisted construction of a Euro coin holder (#P48)
Yeah everything AI is cool at the moment, but can it do useful stuff as well? I recently got fed up with the plastic bag that I throw surplus coins into and wanted some kind of holder for easy dispensal. Doesn’t have to be a fancy mechanism (although that would be neat), I just need to temporarily store a few coins in an orderly fashion. I simply like to leave the house with a known, useful amount of assorted Euro coins, that’s all.
Searching the interwebs yielded this item from jeremrem: thing 55855
Nice, but not perfect. For whatever reason, the slots aren’t evenly spaced. Sooo I thought for a couple minutes if an exact solution would be an easy task…aand then decided to ask AI instead. Spacing things around a circle is easy, even when they’re not the same size, but once they are off-center, as coins of different sizes need to be (they wouldn’t be accessible or would fall out right away, depending on size), that’s quickly becoming non-trivial. So it’s gonna be an AI solution, then. (Hit me up if you know if an exact analytical solution even exists!)
And this is where all the powerful, almighty AI suddenly shits its pants. You see, all of them are able to instantly retrieve the diameters of all Euro coins, that’s a perfect task for an AI. Arranging them with even spacing to each other, ideally in an optimized order (I didn’t ask for a density-optimized solution, to keep the center of gravity actually centered!)…not so much. I tried classic ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok and the next best thing in the Google results, which was DeepAI. All of them got the same prompt and I kept correcting and nagging them until the solutions didn’t evolve any further, some went in circular BS loops, and some were just stuck at a known-false solution. All I wanted was one of each Euro and Eurocent coins arranged in a circular fashion, with their perimeters a fixed distance of 5mm away from each other. For the final version, I moved to 4.5mm instead, but that’s a trivial adjustment once the computational structure is there and fully working.
Here’s the contenders:
Grok:
Yeah, dude, wtf, that’s not even a circular arrangement, let alone physically possible to stack them like this.
DeepAI: Circular, but also not physically possible. I guess this is a geometric arrangement of the coin centers that simply ignores the physical size of them.
ChatGPT (4, I have to say, this was back in early July): Also circular, but not at fixed angles – maybe this is just a spacing problem. In any case, this also wouldn’t work in a physical model.
And, to my surprise, and after lengthy discussions with the model: Copilot.
Now, you probably notice that these are screenshots, as all models seem to rather deliver code that is to be run by the user than run the stuff itself and present an image. This has its own upside: Printing center coordinates for making the model is very easy to do in ideally one extra line of code. Asking Copilot for coordinates NEVER worked, this was the best it could do:
Note that the script that generated the image above already got the correct ones, and that script was fully generated by Copilot. So outputting these coordinates via Copilot did not work, but internally all were generated…so that’s an area that needs improvement in future versions.
Here’s the finalized thing – scale to your liking in height, X/Y is pretty much perfect I’d say. Default model stacks 20pcs of 10 cent coins high.
This is available as thing 7139203, or as direct download in STL or STEP format.
Maybe I should keep this task as a benchmark for future AI evaluation…
