Robocup 2002 World Robot Soccer Championships

dipfan writes "While the rest of the world is watching the soccer world championships in Korea and Japan this summer, at the same time the Robocup 2002 competition for soccer-playing robots is to take place there - the sixth time the tournament has been held, with 35 countries competing and this time including a "humanoid league" competition. The purpose is to foster research in robotics, with the aim of building a team of robots that can play and win against the best human teams by 2050. One of the pre-tournament favourites this year is Iran, who did well in 2000 but not in 2001. The Swedish team includes a star player named Priscilla, described as "looking like a sister of the Terminator". One of the Swedish designers comments: 'you don't want to give too much freedom to the robots as they will go crazy.' Much like flesh-and-blood highly-paid sports stars really."

Comments

Typical

[DrBiscuit]

Robotics is the future. They can go places and do things that humans cannot. Playing soccer is not one of these things.

The only reason they are staging this competition is that combat seems to be the only way that men express themselves or advance their knowledge. Isn't it enough that a robot can track, intercept and guide an object without having to turn it into a "battle" complete with winners and losers?

It would be much more helpful, not to mention supportive and nurturing of the budding scientists, if they instead focussed their aggressive tendencies towards solving problems of vision and cognition.