Last night we tried ChatGPT to see what we could change the “Welcome {MyFamily} Name” at our AirBnB to say.

ChatGPT 3.5 gave suggestions where most of the options needed letters we didn’t have.

ChatGPT 4 took a very long time and then apologized and said it was trying to loop over the letters but it couldn’t verify if they were real words because it didn’t have a dictionary.

Multiple tries returned the exact same results each time.

I’d hate to do this with Legos and then be missing parts part way through!

Same here. I've paid for the quite expensive (relative to mobile apps market) one-off license only to discover it has a very high error ratio (sees blocks that aren't there) and extremely simple projects to build (in the range of 10-30 blocks total). I wouldn't recommend it to anyone barring the free use for simplest of builds.

I was just wondering this earlier today actually, then came across this thread. Is there a vision/ML project for identifying lego bricks? I have 6-7 large tubs of Lego and we're a very active Lego family, and I would absolutely love an easier way to sort bricks than bribing the kids and getting "ok" results. :P

Compared to buying the set of LEGO with a 100 page manual of step by step instructions on how to build something?

This is the sort of thing where artificially generated samples work well. Spawn a random set of blocks, run a physics engine for a bit to have them pile up, add random lights and render to an image. The renderer can also give you a ground truth annotation for each pixel to the corresponding block type.

And its never going to work, at least in its current form. The problem is that some bricks will look the same from top while being different on the bottom. That produces wrong suggestions and you can only discover it when you checked all pieces that are needed for the suggested model. Perhaps it can work with basic collection of pieces, like Lego classic but it can't work with random heap I throw at it.

It was already done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04JkdHEX3Yk

Basically Minecraft

The article literally acknowledges it in the first sentence.

Let’s not gatekeep. People can enjoy their harmless toys in whatever way they want.

If that's truly opposing what Lego is good for, then why does anyone buy Lego sets to build specific things with instructions?

This is just generating different sets of instructions; it's no different conceptually than downloading a PDF of instructions from someone online and building that.

I understand what you're saying, but as someone who spends most of the undirected Lego time with my daughter struggling to figure out what to build, I'm going to suggest that you have fallen into the trap of assuming that the way you do things is "correct" and not simply "the way I do things."

People build sets all the time, that's not odd. What's likely is that my son would like to build some set, where we've never bought it but already have the pieces.

Yes, a subscription model is a big turnoff.