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Robots Aim To Top Humans At Air Hockey
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jul 09, 2008 04:17 PM
from the air-hockey-tables-suck dept.
from the air-hockey-tables-suck dept.
An anonymous reader writes "You probably knew that the Deep Blue supercomputer beats chess masters, and that last weekend a software robot defeated four poker champions. But you may have missed this one: a GE Fanuc robot is taking on humans at air hockey. The robot is powered by a special PC-board that can instantly switch between 8-bit and its 32-bit modes. The 8-bit version lost to most human players, but the 32-bit microcontroller has defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of three to one."
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Submission: Robots aim to top humans at air hockey by Anonymous Coward
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The only real sport (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The only real sport (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The only real sport (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The only real sport (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The only real sport (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know about bears and open mouths, but I'm sure the Japanese are working on a robot that can beat all human challengers at tonsil hockey.
Parent
Re:The only real sport (Score:5, Funny)
I was going to use a mod point here but there's no "+1 Probably True" option.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"How is a robot supposed to get a bear to stand still and open its mouth to throw in a ping pong ball?"
Marshmallows.
Bears *love* marshmallows. They will do anything for a sweet squishy marshmallow.
http://www.clarkstradingpost.com/attractions.php [clarkstradingpost.com]
But I think that after teaching a bear that small white things are sweet and then you toss in a ping pong ball...well...you get what you deserve after that.
--
BMO
Re:The only real sport (Score:5, Funny)
Bear pong?
Squirrel pong, sure; monkey pong, any day; but bear pong? That's where I draw the line.
Parent
Re:The only real sport (Score:5, Funny)
Donkey Pong?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I won't be worried until computers start to beat us at bear pong.
Is that similar to beer pong, only more dangerous?
Re:The only real sport (Score:5, Funny)
And thanks for demonstrating the neurological effects of playing beer pong.
Actually, to be fair, it's very likely that similar malfunctions are also the cause of playing beer pong. Researchers originally thought that positive feedback was initiated by "pledging" a social fraternity/sorority, but it now seems most likely that "pledging" is itself but a symptom of a congenital defect.
The evolutionary advantage for the species is obvious: when defective organisms have a tendency to clump together and disable their higher cognitive functions en masse by imbibing excessive quantities of ethanol, then they can be easily eliminated through mass extermination.
However, there is associated risk: if extermination fails, the defectives may begin interbreeding, thus evolving a subspecies, supertards, which may begin undermining the species' broader social organization, due to the supertards' natural inclination for the lowest-skilled activities---business management, marketing, politics---which are, terrifyingly, activities with great potential for reducing the overall species' quality of life if not bounded and carefully monitored by more intelligent organisms.
The results of careless monitoring could be disastrous. In a "perfect storm" scenario, where the supertards are allowed to impress their opinions upon large groups via mass communication and positions of power, then humanity's classical value system could actually be inverted! Imagine, a world where sports, entertainment, and consumerism are deemed more important than science, philosophy, and art! Where responsibility is shunned, work avoided, and a sense of entitlement the rule! Where xenophobia is disguised as religion, and religion derided by faux-scientific antireligion! Where film actors, instead of being recognized as glorified circus clowns, are given society's highest respect & obsessive admiration! Where full-time sportsman, instead of being mocked for wasting their lives, are beloved "heroes" whose salary is greater than the aggregate salaries of entire university faculties! Where conspicuous consumption is a substitute for cultural tradition! Where public schools are run by political committees and unions! Where the front page of Yahoo! recounts last night's television schedule alongside news of war and natural disaster! I could go on, but why? You see the horrors we could face if the extermination of supertards were to be forgotten.
I certainly hope that never happens.
Parent
Re:The only real sport (Score:4, Funny)
You, sir, just won the internet.
Unfortunately you forgot to log in, so your prize goes back into the pool.
Parent
Boring... (Score:2)
Re:Boring... (Score:5, Funny)
Do you really want robots out there who can check you into the boards and beat you in a fight?
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Re:Boring... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Jan: Well, what would you suggest.
Michael: A statue.
Jan: Of Ed?
Michael: Yeah.
Jan: I'm not sure that's realistic.
Michael: Well, I think it would be very realistic. It would look just like him.
Jan: No, that's not â¦
Michael: We could have his eyes light up, we could have his arms move â¦
Dwight: That is not a statue, that is a robot.
Michael: I think that is a great way to honor Ed.
Dwight: And how big do you want this robot?
Michael: Life size.
Dwight: Mmm, no. Better make it two-thirds. Easier
Re:Boring... (Score:5, Funny)
I'll be worried when they can beat us at Dodge the EMP Blast.
Parent
Re:Boring... (Score:5, Informative)
From wikipedia:
Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NNEMP) is an electromagnetic pulse generated without use of nuclear weapons. There are a number of devices to achieve this objective, ranging from a large low-inductance capacitor bank discharged into a single-loop antenna or a microwave generator to an explosively pumped flux compression generator. To achieve the frequency characteristics of the pulse needed for optimal coupling into the target, wave-shaping circuits and/or microwave generators are added between the pulse source and the antenna. A vacuum tube particularly suitable for microwave conversion of high energy pulses is the vircator.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Bender: Now, Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern-hitting machine.
Leela: Exactly. He was a machine designed to hit blerns.
Shufflepuck (Score:3, Informative)
All I can say is:
"Good shot"
pfft eight bits to lose? (Score:5, Funny)
I refuse to be impressed.
I can create a 2 bit air hockey robot that will lose to everyone but Butters!
Video (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
If this is'nt skynet.... (Score:5, Funny)
Robots also top humans at arm wrestling.. (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, it's not as if some robot is paintaing abstract art or writing poetry here.
Robots exceeding humans in strength and precision when designed to do so is not news, it's our technology "working as intended".
If they didn't exceed human strength or precision, i'd expect articles like "engineer blacklisted as incompetent for designing defective robotics"
Re:Robots also top humans at arm wrestling.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Robots also top humans at arm wrestling.. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Honestly, it's not as if some robot is paintaing abstract art or writing poetry here."
You picked a couple of interesting examples; I'm sure robots could paint abstract art and write poetry that would match some of today's offerings by human beings. Anyway, I have no idea how complex it is to program a robot to play air hockey, and whether it involves only strength and precision, but there was an idea I read in a book by Douglas Hofstadter that I find amusing: artificial intelligence is always defined as whatever a machine cannot do yet.
Parent
Re:Robots also top humans at arm wrestling.. (Score:4, Insightful)
artificial intelligence is always defined as whatever a machine cannot do yet.
I wish I had mod points, you are exactly right. It's funny how people forget that what was once thought to be something only a human could do, if a machine is able to do that task better, then of course the machine could do it better. After all, that is what it was designed for.
Parent
Re:Robots also top humans at arm wrestling.. (Score:4, Informative)
it's designed to upsell 32 bit processors. Annoyingly enough, it just takes x,y coordinates from a vision system, estimates trajectories, and outputs position data to a robotic arm. Really, you should be able to compile code on the nes to do that. It calculates three rebounds? That seems somehow like an easy task if you're being fed realtime position information.
Color me amused but unimpressed. It is a great ad, but an ad nonetheless.
Parent
I for one welcome... (Score:2, Interesting)
On to the real subject...
"If droids could think for themselves we would not be here"
The day is coming when most if not all the routine and skilled functions of life will be carried out better by robots than by humans.
The last bastion for the human mind will be pure abstract thinking.
I do not even pretend to know what that new day will bring to the meaning of mankind when computers become better than the human mind a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
QED?
Re:I for one welcome... (Score:5, Funny)
I for one welcome our meme-devising robotic overlords.
Parent
smarter or faster? (Score:2)
The article hints at both, so it's hard to tell if the robot's true advantage lies in being able to analyze the puck's path more quickly than the human players, or is the robot arm simply faster/more powerful/more accurate than a human arm? If the former, then that's pretty cool. But if it's the latter, well heck, I can hop in a car and drive faster than an Olympic runner, but I don't write articles about it.
Smarter and faster (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why? It's a game where the puck is operating in a near frictionless environment. Hence, the speed can be computed as if it is linear. Of course a robot can more precisely measure time between samples and the location of an object on a fixed plane. So, the ca
Can this be a good idea? (Score:5, Funny)
First they're beating us at chess, then at air hockey... pretty soon they're rolling around yelling "EX..TER..MI..NATE", disintegrating us, and avoiding staircases.
This is how the human race ends, mark my words.
(Yeah, I know, the Daleks are supposed to be cyborgs. Roll with it, it's supposed to be a joke.)
Computer needed at all? (Score:4, Funny)
Wouldn't just setting the arm to oscillate in an arc in front of the the goal at a few thousand rpm make scoring against it impossible? (Not to mention the 200mph random rebounds coming off a blocked shot?)
Am I the only one who wants to take it on? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's more, if the arms were standard and mass-produced, there's a great excuse for a little coding competition: Whose program will win when it's robot v. robot?
Lots of cool AI, artificial learning and computer vision would go into it, and the result would no doubt be fun to watch!
better uses (Score:3, Funny)
Good work, GE boffins. It warms my cockles to see our best minds conquer one more idle pastime that robots hadn't already been programmed for. When the Japanese finally achieve their ultimate goal of an android with functional genitals, those air-hockey robots will be left playing with themselves.
Re:Seems like this would be trivial... (Score:4, Informative)
Don't know which article you read, but:
Parent
Re:Seems like this would be trivial... (Score:5, Informative)
Humans can still score on it occasionally, so they're `beating' it in that sense. But overall, it still wins more than it loses.
Statistically speaking, if it averages 3x the score of it's opponents, a human should be able to beat it once in a while -- it just hasn't happened yet.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But air hockey is different. The board doesn't change from point to point. If your robot is fast enough to never miss a puck that's under a certain speed, and the puck never can re
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not at all like that. Chess is a positional game. The proper analogy would be that Deep Blue wasn't "unbeatable" because it's position was seen to be deteriorating during some stretch of the game.
Re:Seems like this would be trivial... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, if the most points you can score is around five, then you're fucked and it's unbeatable, yes.
However, that's not likely to be the reality. The reality is more likely to be that for each point, the computer has a 75% chance of making it and you have a 25% change of making it. So in the vast majority of cases, the computer is going to outscore you 3:1 ... but if you were to have an incredible string of luck, and hit your 25% 5 times in a row -- the computer probably couldn't catch up before you hit 7. Yes, the odds are certainly not in your favor, but winning (reaching 7 points first) is not impossible.
Now, as I understand it, the computer does learn, so it's skill at playing you should increase over time, but humans can learn too.
Either way, if you can ever score on the computer, then it's not unbeatable. It might require incredible luck, but if you can get lucky enough to score once, you can get lucky enough to score seven times in a row. (Though it seems to me that you ought to be able to make a computer that is unbeatable, just make it fast enough to deal with the fastest possible puck moving in the most crazy possible way. Then you'd never score on it, unless something actually broke/failed.)
Parent
Re:Seems like this would be trivial... (Score:4, Funny)
I'll let your argument stand, but only because Federer lost.
You're getting off easy.
Parent
Re:Unrealistic Competition (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yeah, and? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think that this is how poker works at a professional level, you don't know very much about poker.
Tells are a small factor at a professional level.
Good players already have a firm understanding of the pot odds and expected value of a call.
The major problem with writing a good poker program is that it can't be exploitable. If the program is too "tight", an experienced human player will realize this and can always raise with trash (because the program will fold), with a minimal chance of getting caught. If the program is too "loose", the human player can play good hands far more aggressively, knowing that the program will call.
This is a very general example. In reality, poker strategy is far more nuanced. But the basic problem that computers face is not being predictable. And, no, playing randomly doesn't help - it merely substitutes poor play for predictable play.
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