Who Would Win: Samurai or Viking? Data Will Decide

As a company full of male engineers, it’s no surprise that a fellow employee happened to be watching Spike TV last week and noted an interesting show. It’s a conversation topic that is shared amongst practically any social gathering of engineers:

Who would win in a fight to the death?
(Insert your historical warrior figure here) vs. (insert other warrior here)

A 2 hour- 45 minute conversation ensues, chock full of citations, estimations, equations and perhaps even re-enactments to judge which historial warrior is the deadliest. Oh yes, it gets extremley geeky.

Spike TV has created a show to tackle such a question: Deadliest Warrior. I happened to catch last week’s episode: Ninja vs. Spartan. It’s a lot like Myth Busters; lots of lab experiments to measure and analyze the fatality of the warrior weapons and the ruggedness of their armor. Piercing, stabbing, clubbing and impailing is tracked with accelerometers, high-speed cameras, gyroscopes, and strain gauges. Of course, it can get a little messy; most of the experimental runs are conducted on jello-like human test dummies and real pig cadavers. Mmm, delicious.

There’s a lot of data analysis that goes into determining who would win. What better tools to quickly and easily acquire and analyze massive amounts of sensor data? LabVIEW and DIAdem, of course. Watch the show and you’ll see our software on their laptop screens. Everytime you see the data being displayed, you are looking at NI software.

See for yourself (and see if you would agree with the outcome; I didn’t want to spoil it for you)

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