Robots Aim To Top Humans At Air Hockey

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."

Futurama

Bender: Now, Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern-hitting machine.
Leela: Exactly. He was a machine designed to hit blerns.

pfft eight bits to lose?

I refuse to be impressed.

I can create a 2 bit air hockey robot that will lose to everyone but Butters!

Video

They could make a robot that beats human players at air-hockey but they were not able to make a watchable video or it in action? I guess it is all about specialization.

If this is'nt skynet....

This must be one of the best ways to get a research grant to pay for an air hockey table I've ever heard.

Robots also top humans at arm wrestling..

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..

Yeah but if they created a working human like arm with the strength and reaction time of an average human and it still beat everyone in arm wrestling or air hockey, then I would be impressed. That kind of research would also be very useful for creating artificial limbs.

Re:Robots also top humans at arm wrestling..

"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.

Can this be a good idea?

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?

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?

I would love to see this in an arcade. I'd pay a dollar to play the arm - bring on the 32bit mode! If they could make the arm fold itself out of the way while two people are playing, this would make an excellent arcade machine.

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!

Re:The only real sport

How is a robot supposed to get a bear to stand still and open its mouth to throw in a ping pong ball?

Re:The only real sport

Good thing you cleared that up, I thought it meant hitting a grizzly back and forth across a table.

Re:The only real sport

if that was the case I'm sure robots would be able to beat us quite easily.

Re:The only real sport

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.

Re:The only real sport

I was going to use a mod point here but there's no "+1 Probably True" option.

Re:The only real sport

Bear pong?

Squirrel pong, sure; monkey pong, any day; but bear pong? That's where I draw the line.

Re:The only real sport

Donkey Pong?

Re:The only real sport

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.

Re:Boring...

Do you really want robots out there who can check you into the boards and beat you in a fight?

Re:Boring...

I'll be worried when they can beat us at Dodge the EMP Blast.

Re:Boring...

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.

Re:Seems like this would be trivial...

They didn't really state it was unbeatable, just that it beats human players easily, most of the time.

Don't know which article you read, but:

So far, the robot has defeated every human opponent running in 32-bit mode, averaging three times as many goals as human players. The algorithm's success resulted from revising its strategy whenever a goal was scored against it. Some revisions were refinements of strategies, but others were outright fixes to bugs in tactics.

Re:Seems like this would be trivial...

Depends on what you mean by `unbeatable'.

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.

Re:I for one welcome...

I for one welcome our meme-devising robotic overlords.

Re:Unrealistic Competition

I don't think I'd want to play foosball against a robot. Imagine how hard a robot would be able to jam the pole into your junk when he grabbed the wrong handle.