10th Annual RoboCup 104
Aryabhata writes "As soccer fever continues the 10th RoboCup also got to a start. 400 teams fight it out in 11 different leagues including onces designed for humanoid to four legged robots. "The organizers of the tournament hope that in 2050 the winners of the RoboCup will be able to beat the human World Cup champions".
Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas. The championships is followed by a 2 day conference where the teams can dissect their play and work."
Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas. The championships is followed by a 2 day conference where the teams can dissect their play and work."
2050 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:2050 (Score:5, Funny)
Well lets look at what current footballers are like. Mostly dumb, and very vain.
We have dumb robots, so we just have to work on the 'vain' bit over the next 44 years.
Re:2050 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:2050 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:2050 (Score:3, Insightful)
Robots will still have the advantage (Score:3, Insightful)
Well think of it logically. With robotics there is no limit to how powerful you can make their sensors and motors without causing harm to anything. It's just a matter of technology. WIth humans you can't just start attaching parts in a slap
Re:Robots will still have the advantage (Score:2)
You didn't learn that by experience did you? (n/t) (Score:2)
Re:Robots will still have the advantage (Score:2)
Re:Robots will still have the advantage (Score:3, Interesting)
He is, but that has nothing to do with robotics. :-P
On a more serious note, given that the only part of the body that's really needed for an otherwise mechanical entity to be considered a "human" cyborg is the brain, who says that robots will have the advantage?
I'd say a 800 pound cybernetic football player with a metal body and a human brain (augmented by microchips) would have an advantage over the same metal body governed by a computer. After all, computers
Re:Robots will still have the advantage (Score:3, Interesting)
But seriously, will we also allow instant communications and radio-coordination between players on the field? This can make all the difference. Of-course if the cyborgs can also do this then the outcome is not certain.
However if we also don't bother too much with the definition of a player, then the robot team can just roll out a cannon, load the b
Re:Robots will still have the advantage (Score:3, Interesting)
If we said today that the only requirement for playing pro sports was that the player be human, then what would stop the athletes from doping themselves to the gils before play? I would imagine that if there was a "cyborg league", there'd be some sort of rule set for what equipment is allowable on the player, equivalent to the rules we have now about steroid use.
Re:Robots will still have the advantage (Score:2)
Re:Robots will still have the advantage (Score:1)
Re:Wrong. StrongAI will still have the advantage (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, you are falling into the fa
Bleh Making some faulty assumptions. (Score:2)
You just said the same thing I said only a lot more verbese. I was even thinking of Ghost in the Shell when I wrote that stupid psot.
Re:Robots will still have the advantage (Score:1)
Re:2050 (Score:2)
Just because some predictions fail, it doesn't mean that all of them do.
These robots, however advanced by today's standards, are ridiculously rudimentary in relation to what would be needed to compete effectively against a human organism.
Which robots? The ones we have now? Of course, so what?
Coincidentally, the CAPTCHA for this p
Re:2050 (Score:2)
Well because of decentralization, saftey error, and economics.
The reason we don't colonies on the moon was because it wasn't economical and that the space program was centralized to a government agency. Hence, their funding was at the mercy of politicians and even with billions of dollars per year they aren't going to acheive muc
Re:2050 (Score:1)
Why they chose soccer (Score:2)
A few missing things are added by the Rescue League: recognition and
Press release for Sango and Ami (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Press release for Sango and Ami (Score:2)
Re:Press release for Sango and Ami (Score:2)
Interestingly, I was in the same boat as you until a couple of years ago. As a die-hard geek, I could never see what the point was with soccer, until my girlfriend introduced it to me (read it twice if you have to, yes I was introduced by a girl).
Then I discovered that it's a wonderful game, able to scale from a few kids kicking around a rolled up sock all the way to massive international games of skill. Having a game that can be played by
power (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:power (Score:1)
Re:power (Score:2)
Why not fuel cells? Hydogen and elsewise? Perhaps carbon nanotube capacitors [physorg.com]?
Of course this is kind of like asking someone in 1906, how one would go about finding a method to fuel a Messerschmitt Me 262 [wikipedia.org] jet fighter so that it will have flight times of more than 20 minutes (which won't exist until 1944).
Re:power (Score:2)
Re:power (Score:1)
Re:power (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, living organisms are very efficient at what they do, but we are not talking about living organisms.
Calculating chemical power requirements for living cells and organisms that comprise of living cells is not that different from calculating power requirements for a 100W lightbulb. Sure, living organisms are efficient in using chemical energy, but these chemicals in themselves are not the best storage mechanism for machines, that need lots of power instantly. That's why excavators burn petrol byproducts for power and not potato chips.
By the way a car for example can in principle use solar power directly, but a human cannot. A human has to wait for a plant to use the solar power and then a human can eat the plant. This is an inderect way to retrieve power and it is not the most efficient way.
Re:power (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes those robot have all the batteries on board and they have a very short duration: the absolute maximum was more or less 20 minutes, but some robots had batteries that lasted less than 60 seconds (the duration required for a single kick: the competitions in the humanoid league are pretty simple for now
2050? Yeah, right. (Score:2, Insightful)
As a goal to encourage scientific progress it may be a good idea. As a p
Re:2050? Yeah, right. (Score:5, Funny)
Well after that yellow card, things are getting rough out there on the field. And look, the robots are putting in their hooligan who used to be a battlebot.
Re:2050? Yeah, right. (Score:2)
As a goal to encourage scientific progress it may be a good idea. As a practical matter, I don't think it is.
And that is the whole point. To encourage scientific progress. It is an enormous challenge to create a robot that can be a match for a human in a sport such as soccer. The difficulties that have to be resolved are huge. These matches provide a forum for comparing work with others and for exchanging ideas. It speeds up progress considerably.
A similar event has started this year around RTS game A [ualberta.ca]
The question still stands (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: The question still stands (Score:2)
That's a commonly held idea, though it isn't well established, and has its critics. [wikipedia.org]
Re:The question still stands (Score:2)
Re:The question still stands (Score:2)
Re:Prety much (Score:2)
#include [body]
#include [mind]
if (stomach == NULL)
{
findfood ( chips, pizza, burger);
}
elseif(girlfriend == TRUE)
{
havesex(lighton, lightsoff, withmasks);
}
elseif(slashdotreader == TRUE)
{
nothavesex(lookAtPorn, CleanKeybo
Re:The question still stands (Score:1)
Re:The question still stands (Score:3, Insightful)
I think a more interesting question would be what would happen if we assume the existance of such a working brain. Our experience has been that when we can make it work, a computer is damn fast and damn precise at it. A computer can never die, never forget, be an expert at almost everything. Imagine a computer that could comprehend and set in system all the informatio
Curious about a detail (Score:2)
Re:Curious about a detail (Score:2)
Re:Curious about a detail (Score:2)
I wonder if in team sports it is prohibited to use radios to communicate with the team members?)
In football I think so, at the very least because it's equipment which can harm the player or other players (yes, there's a rule for that).
A remark I forgot (Score:2)
Re:Curious about a detail (Score:1)
Some additions/corrections:
For the 10000th time, (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For the 10000th time, (Score:2)
Re:Silly northamericans. (Score:2)
Re:Silly northamericans. (Score:2)
Re:Silly northamericans. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Silly northamericans. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Silly northamericans. (Score:1)
Damn now I'm stuck trying to imagine what a ball rensembling a basket, a base, or a volley might look like.
Re:Silly northamericans. (Score:1)
the highest scoring player on every football team. (Score:2)
They only score half as much on each play (3 pts versus 6), but they score a lot more often. And that's before you even count extra points.
And the total distance gained in punts is virtually always larger than the total distance from runs and passes.
The foot is an enormous factor in American football. No team could win without applying it to the ball (let alone running on it).
Re:Silly northamericans. (Score:3)
Re:Silly northamericans. (Score:2)
Re:North America? (Score:2)
I give you that there are a few people in Canada and the US who still call soccer football, but if they want the majority to understand what they are talking about, they still have to name it properly.
Re:For the 10000th time, (Score:2)
Re:For the 10000th time, (Score:2)
Re:For the 10000th time, (Score:2)
Ideally there would be some way to day it with a French accent and then we'd know immediately that you means Soccer or Round Ball, or whatever we'd end up calling it. Hey, keep calling it Football. I mean it works for you.
Re:For the 10000th time, (Score:2, Insightful)
Games as an AI research platform. (Score:4, Insightful)
FYI, though RoboCup has been around for a long time, the past few years have seen a sudden surge of interest in the use of games as a platform for AI research. In addition to the now vast literature on RoboCup there are several new conferences dedicated to AI and games, usually covering non-RoboCup topics. Grep the net for Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG), and the Special Session on Games at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). I've seen some of the proceedings on line, and you can find some pretty interesting papers about applications, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
Re:Games as an AI research platform. (Score:3, Informative)
Some time ago I had some interest in AI research. I visited an international Robocup event in Slovenia because I thought I might see some interesting concepts being used there.
I talked with several teams and I was quite surprised when I saw how primitive the their programs were. They basically had thousand nested "if" statements. No neural nets or any
Re: Games as an AI research platform. (Score:3, Insightful)
Kind of like the "beat Kasparov" approach to chess-playing AI. When competition is involved, people resort to hardware and hacks. That says a lot about the state of AI after ~50 years of
Re:Games as an AI research platform. (Score:2)
As far as I know, the whole tournament could have been played entirely in software. The little robots were there only for the audience to see something.
You have to remember that robotics is about hardware and software. Both of these have their own problems. Usually competitions of hardware robots are all about solving issues with hardware noise. That is why RoboCup has separate hardware and software (i.e., simulation) competitions.
Re:Games as an AI research platform. (Score:1)
That's pretty close to how the Loebner prize competition has turned out as well; most entrants seem to be designed for cheating the Turing test rather than making a genuine effort. It's quite telling that, while ELIZA [wikipedia.org] was written way back in 1966, all the top contestants still work by the same basic principle of static stimulus-response rules. The main difference is that the databases are larger and thus able to cover more cases (and at least one entry could build its database based on user input).
The m
MegaHAL is great (Score:3, Interesting)
A bunch of friends and I used to run a bunch of MegaHAL bots on an IRC network. A couple of them ran for several years. We let them talk to one another on channels sometimes, with appropriate rate-limiting. After a while the longer-running ones started to seem more and more insane as their databases grew larger and larger. Eventually one of them exploded and corrupted its database somehow; we couldn't be bothered to fix it, but it was a fun experiment while it lasted.
Re:MegaHAL is great (Score:1)
Same here, I had a MegaHAL bot running on a pretty active IRC channel for a few years. The reason the overtraining makes it act strangely is because the algorithm picks a sentence out of several generated with the most information value; that is, the least probable one. MegaHAL also generates as many candidate replies as it can within a preset time frame, so with a faster computer you have a higher probability of getting some of the weird special cases that have accumulated in the model over its lifetime.
Yeah, right (Score:3, Insightful)
"This vision includes the development of a humanoid robot team of eleven players, which can win against a human soccer world champion team."
Even granting the somewhat unlikely prospect of a robot team that can match the skill and tactical experience of a human side, I can't see them overcoming the obvious safety problems.
Call me when Minoru Asada is willing to demo what it's like to be slide-tackled by a robot, and I'll reconsider.
Re:Yeah, right (Score:2)
So all a human player will have to do is come up with some set of events where a goal saves'em from certain death---and then they'll win
Re:Yeah, right (Score:2)
In fact, if and when a robot can play football as good as a human, there is not much chance that the machine is going to be built like a T-34. We'll be talking about lightweight plastics, flexible composite materials, microstructures for muscles. The robot would probably not weight much more than a human and probably a lot less, since non-football functions can be removed. Of course some steel will be there, but for the purposes of the game it'll certainly be wel
robocup 2006 home page (Score:5, Informative)
The BEEB's blurb was interesting, but here is a link to the RoboCup 2006 home page [robocup2006.org]
There are pics, background, schedules, leagues, etc.
Transgojobot is on his way. programmed (Score:1)
Re:robocup 2006 home page (Score:1)
It's over already (Score:5, Informative)
It got to a start four days ago and finished at about the same time as this story was posted!
Anyway, I was quite impressed - watched lots of it through an internet live stream. The humanoids still have a way to go, but in a few years, it will look much better.
There are lots of videos on http://www.robocup.zdf.de/ [robocup.zdf.de] (in German).
SmilingBoy.
Robo-cup... (Score:1)
The real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
Ow! Ref! The human just kicked me in my power coupler! The pain! The pain! ::convincing limp::...
Re:The real question is... (Score:1)
Ow! Ref! The human just kicked me in my power coupler! The pain! The pain!
While this was modded funny, it could be a major issue when humans take on robots, if the robots have no sense of pain. Slide tackles into a robot which just keeps going, slide tackles from robots that are many times heavier than their human counterparts causing serious permenant injury to the human player. etc.
Starbucks' RoboCup? (Score:3, Funny)
"Careful, the beverage you're about to enjoy is extremely hot, Creep." --Jonah in RoboCop Archive forum thread [robocoparchive.com].
Sure they'll win in 2050 (Score:2)
Re:Sure they'll win in 2050 (Score:1)
Robocup is the coolest thing on the planet... (Score:2)
This stuff should be on tv every year in full coverage real time coverage.
Re:Robocup is the coolest thing on the planet... (Score:2)
This stuff should be on tv every year in full coverage real time coverage.
Hey, it's SOCCER. No one in the USA watches soccer.
No sports fan in the USA will care about a robot until it gets over 700 home runs (or by 2050, perhaps 980 - sorry, Babe, Hank and Barry). And then there will be rumors that it uses nuclear power.
2050 ? (Score:1)
Now that Sony has retired the Aibo... (Score:1)