Lego Robot Plays Tetris 94
kkleiner writes "What's the surest sign that robots aspire to be more like humans? They play video games. The Tetris-Bot operates completely without human interference to play games of old school Tetris on a computer. Creator Branislov Kisacanin patched together a webcam, a digital signaling processing board, and some NXT Lego as a fun educational project for his kids."
I don't know about you guys... (Score:5, Funny)
But THIS is why I read slashdot. All that other news stuff is just fluff.
Re:I don't know about you guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny? Try Insightful. This article is pure, geeky goodness.
At least until those damned duplos fanbois show up... >:(
Re:I don't know about you guys... (Score:4, Funny)
Or even worse -- the MegaBlocks fanbois.
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c'mon, i compared a lego kit with nearly the same specs as a megabloks kit, and it was twice the price.
plus, there's no halo lego kits [google.com]...
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Yeah. But Megabloks don't connect together nearly as well as Lego, nor do they hold up as well over time. They're cheaper because they're inferior quality.
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but you can build better cars with lego
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In other news, mechanically reconstituted bollockburgers of vaguely mammalian origin cost half the price of decent fillet from a verifiable species.
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Your geek powers are weak
http://starwars.lego.com/ [lego.com]
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But THIS is why I read slashdot. All that other news stuff is just fluff.
And if you read Hack A Day, you could have read about it 5 days ago...
http://hackaday.com/2010/04/15/mindstorm-plays-tetris-for-you/ [hackaday.com]
-- Dave
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Whiskey Tango Hotel (Score:4, Funny)
A robot doesn't "aspire" to anything. They're frigging electronics, metal and plastic.
Re:Whiskey Tango Hotel (Score:5, Funny)
Don't anthropomorphize them, they hate it when you do that.
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This has to be the collest story I have read in weeks, and all you can do is critize a tounge in cheek comment?
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Yes.
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Welcome to slashdot.
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Yes, and we can criticize your spelling as well. You misspelled half of the multisyllabic words in your post, plus a monosyllabic word.
Next.
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Well played :)
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But the chemical composition of human beings changes that? You do know that your brain simply processes electrical signals right, and that we've made great strides in using man made robotic components to send signals to the brain, thus furthering the notion that we are not all as different as you seem.
Yes - we've heard it all before, they just run programs. What if we manage the impossible taks of reverse engineering all the things that make being human into a mathematical algorithm and have a robot run the
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I dunno. Depends on where you're coming from. If you're a believer in some religions, then no, it's not a life because it doesn't have a soul. But if you're an atheist, then it could be, except it doesn't "die". So I dunno.
I do know that dogs and cats have souls. Some humans don't.
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If I found someone who faithfully followed a religion to that end, I would argue that I don't see why a Robot couldn't have a soul.
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I agree with you. It's one of the reasons I was turned off of religion at a very early age. (Was told that my dog that had just died didn't have a soul so it wouldn't be in heaven when I made it.)
WTF, preacher!?! Excellent job, "tending" your flock. :-/
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That is not dead, which can eternal lie.
Yet in strange ovens, I could bake a pie.
-- H.P. Lovescrust.
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i think you got some... cooking mama.. in your... lovecraftian horror?
*headdesk* i need some sleep.
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I do know that dogs and cats have souls. Some humans don't.
You do know that dogs and cats are engineered to get along with humans, by humans, don't you? So if they have a soul, then we have created it. Actually I'll stop fucking about - that comment is moronic beyond all categorisation. You have set yourself up to judge which entities have souls, it just happens to coincide with animals that we've bred to live alongside us, and excludes some "nasty" humans in your opinion.
IMO... Dogs and cats don't hav
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You do know that dogs more than likely domesticated themselves right? And that cats, according to a lot of scientists and behaviorists, aren't really even domesticated at all?
You also do realize the above comment you're referring to was a "throw-away" comment on an article about a stupid tetris playing lego machine? Right? If not, not really my concern. Moronic comment? Please. I can do much much worse.
IMO... Dogs and cats don't have souls. People don't have souls. Arguing about souls does not actuall
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there's the biological definition of life: a few simple rules that apply to (nearly) all that we know of as "living". ... waaaait. something went wrong there.
- it has dna
- it reproduces (and can produce at least grandchildren)
- it takes in substances and processes it into other substances for nourishment
- something something
- ???
- profit!
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well, my bio teacher explained that away with that it has to qualify for MOST of the rules he named, and mules didn't really come up. virii/viruses did, though.
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Yes, they have R-souls, or they wouldn't be able to shit.
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Life is defined scientifically as the ability to utilize resources to sustain oneself. In most basic terms, that makes it seem like a robot could be considered alive, except that it is completely and utterly dependent upon someone else to supply it that resource, and is not able to go out and forage for resources on its own. Some exceptions sort of barely apply.
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Screw that, I'm hedging my bets by being cool with them now. When the first machines finally become sentient, I'm hoping that they'll recognize that I was their bud all along and not just rip my limbs off like the rest of their former slave masters.
Next Physical Tetris? (Score:4, Interesting)
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So will someone make Tetris blocks out of legos
No, because there's no such thing.
Alright, smarty pants, they'll make tetris blocks out of LEGO® brand building blocks. Probably easier with Duplo or Quadro.
There would have to be a way to limit rotation to only one axis (easy to do with two sheets of plexiglass), and also a way to do the rotation in that axis (much harder with plexiglass in the way). Maybe forget gravity and make the robot "drop" the pieces by holding on to them from the start, then you could switch to a table, and have more stability, also you could use gravity to
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How would you remove a row from the middle or top though?
Hmm, I clearly shouldn't design LEGO mindstorms tetris games while working; the work is distracting. Unlike a human, the computer could prevent itself from "thinking" about the move while it took extra time away to clear rows by some complicated method, but that makes it a less interesting for humans to watch (which I believe is the ultimate point).
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Let's work together on this. I'll cover the falling part, you find a way to make the rows disappear.
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It won't be gray goo, then. It'll be jagged rainbow-colored goo that clacks and clicks as it pursues you to disassemble you into your constituent bricks.
You know, I didn't mean to make that rhyme, but why not?
Anyway, I think you have nothing to fear from the impending macrotechnology* apocalypse unless you, or your property, are made of Legos.
*You can't call it nanotechnology; have you seen how big those bricks can get?
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Anyway, I think you have nothing to fear from the impending macrotechnology apocalypse unless you, or your property, are made of Legos.
I'm pretty sure our LEGO overlords can figure out how to make plastics out of biomass. It's all hydrocarbons, right?
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We had a self-replicating automoton a long time ago. It's called cc [bytes.com].
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s/automoton/automaton/g
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I don't know, but I'm using my lego robotics to cheat at Pokemon. [youtube.com] This is physical, because it's creating artificial motion to pump up my Pokemon-pedometer ("Pokewalker"), thereby circumventing a device designed to get lazy people to move their lazy asses. Who needs exercise when you have SCIENCE!
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That's the thing about robots. You can make them play with themselves and they can't figure out how to win.
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That's the thing about robots. You can make them play with themselves and they can't figure out how to win.
Sometimes they learn to lie about winning, though. "I found 'food'" "Ha, it's really 'poison'. Losers!" *beep*
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/01/19/0258214.shtml [slashdot.org]
Sounds Like My Parents (Score:2)
Poor robot.
Mysterious Tetris video... (Score:5, Interesting)
On a closely related note, here's another video of a tool-assisted playing of Tetris, with an interesting mystery to it:
Clicky [youtube.com]
It won't make sense at first, but once you get it, you'll see a little more art in the art of video games.
Ryan Fenton
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Doing that is actually a special rank in Tetris The Grand Master.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K4RxUpZ9Ss
Uh, no, this i not a lego robot playing tetris (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a (probably expensive) DSP decoding the video and then the lego robot figuring out how to move. Give that robot some vision of its own, and I'll be more impressed.
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Agreed (Score:1)
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Presto! Problem solved - a robot that plays Tetris.
Serious question, does an integrated system such as this qualify to be a robot even if the components are physically separate?
But... (Score:1)
Let me be the first (Score:1)
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Faster (Score:1)
Game-playing robots (Score:2)
I've thought about this back in the days of Pacman and Defender about the feasibility of creating a machine with vision and mechanical access to the controls of a game if it could be taught to play indefinitely (at least for the games that had no real end).
I don't think this is the first time it has been applied to Tetris. But it shouldn't be hard to solve Space Invaders. Asteroids would be an interesting challenge. A computer playing Centipede perfectly would be very impressive (if it had to physically spi
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I don't think this is the first time it has been applied to Tetris. But it shouldn't be hard to solve Space Invaders.
Tetris has been solved [wikia.com], though not the older version from 1985 seen in the video.
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... thou it deserves a way better tetris algorithm. The current one fails a lot, specially for level 1.
That is what I thought as well watching the video, why put the straight in a line on top of another. Also, it seems pretty slow to move things around, is this why he is showing it on level 1? Does it not move fast enough for later levels?
First Lego League (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/fll/content.aspx?id=13056 [usfirst.org]
Nice hack, but... (Score:1)
RPGs (Score:2)
It'd be interesting to make a bot like this that plays MMOs or something equally repetitive -- is that against terms of service? How would they know?
I remember making a "robot" to beat Ruby Weapon in FF7, which consisted of a coffee cup pressing the X button -- the fight took 2 hours thanks to summon animations.
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It'd be interesting to make a bot like this that plays MMOs or something equally repetitive -- is that against terms of service? How would they know?
I remember making a "robot" to beat Ruby Weapon in FF7, which consisted of a coffee cup pressing the X button -- the fight took 2 hours thanks to summon animations.
Wouldn't that just attack? No summons no inv and you would get owned? Plus I mean if you wanted to cheese an optional boss that was just there for you to have fun with there are many ways to end the fight quickly. Lucky 7s, Vincent bug, etc.
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Nope. You put cursor on "memory". You let every party member die except 1. After the you have one party member left, you use the materia allowing you to multisummon. The first summon puts the boss to sleep (hades? It's been a while) but does little damage. 2nd summon does damage of your choice (bahamut? Doesn't matter really. You could actually beat it with just hades, but it does so little damage...)
Mime. With sufficient haste, you can then simply mime again for the rest of the fight. Ruby never
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I misspoke. You actually use hades second. First summon does damage, then he's immediately put to sleep by hades.
Bricks for bricks... (Score:2, Funny)
What about more complicated games (Score:1)
Is that just me, or ist the bot crap at Tetris? (Score:3)
Sorry folks, but while I'm a total n00b when it comes to robots, I believe I could come up with a much better Tetris solving programm in a single day. Is it just me or is that bot really bad at Tetris?
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Yawn. (Score:2)
Of course it can be solved with a simple algorithm. Using peripherals made for humans, of course makes it harder, but in this case not very much.
AI (Score:2)
Anyone know anything about the AI behind this? Tetris is NP-Complete, so how is it solving it?