Stanford senior Joel Cameron will fail his honors thesis after his advanced prototype robot “Jeremy Lin” crashed in the middle of an NBA game last Monday at Madison Square Garden.
The critical error occurred when Lin’s programming was unable to respond to a return pass from New York Knicks forward and notorious ball-hog Carmelo Anthony.
Cameron clarifies, “We worked out a lot of bugs in the earlier Lin prototypes, including trying to avoid off-by-one errors in shooting one versus two free throws, and even writing a program to translate NBA broadcaster Charles Barkley’s mangled English into something that Lin could understand. But it turns out that catching a pass from Carmelo Anthony was just too far-fetched of a situation for us to account for in a typical NBA game.
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When Lin’s programming crashed and his figure went limp, the referees actually let the game continue for several minutes before realizing something was wrong.
“I watch guys like Mike Bibby and Hedo Turkoglu play defense every night,” explained NBA referee Frank Smith, “I’m used to seeing guys stand around lethargically with their mouths slightly agape as they let opposing players run by them.”
Cameron is appealing his grade on the basis that he worked hard to make his prototype as human-like as possible, even developing a complex backstory in which the robot excelled at an obscure university in the northeast. Such efforts initially paid off, as Lin took the NBA by storm and demonstrating the unlimited potential for Cyborg-American athletes everywhere.
