10th Annual RoboCup

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."

Comments

2050

[rbarreira]

In 2050, the question "Is a team of robots capable of beating a team of humans in football?" will be irrelevant (or at least very different from what it is now). What is a human? Do "cyborg-like" modifications to one's body allow him to be considered human? Etc etc...

Re:2050

[mustafap]

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

[Alsn]

You wont be playing in the world cup as a footballer if youre a dumb, vain one. Regardless of what the average is the "best" will always be the smarter/stronger ones.

Re:2050

[Anonymous Coward]

Robots already have a degree of self awareness. Position sensors, battery charge monitors, etc are all designed to let a robot know about itself in relation to the world. As we develop more sophisticated robots, they will require a greater degree of self awareness. Right now, industrial robots are basically programmed at the "goto position x1,y1,z1; close gripper; goto position x2,y2,z2; release gripper;" level. If you want them to work at the "Pick up part X from conveyor belt; dip part in solvent tank;" level, the robot is going to have to be able to coordinate vision and arm motion. In other words it will have to have a greater degree of self awareness. When you get into higher level stuff (same robot, multiple tasks) the robot will have to keep track of which tool it has, what loads it is capable of manipulating, etc.

In short, the more self aware the robot, the higher the level of abstraction you get in assigning tasks to it.

Re:2050

[Anonymous Coward]

You read too much sci-fi, and too little comp sci.

Re:2050

[Anonymous Coward]

And in 2001 we are all going to be jetting around space, living in colonies on the moon. Why does everyone persist in making rediculous time-conditional statements about technology? 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.

Coincidentally, the CAPTCHA for this post was 'automate'. That's what robots will be used for in 2050, because they'll be cheaper than sweatshops.

Re:2050

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you stealing posts from other stories which are irrelevant here anyway?

Re:2050

[rbarreira]

And in 2001 we are all going to be jetting around space, living in colonies on the moon. Why does everyone persist in making rediculous time-conditional statements about technology?

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 post was 'automate'. That's what robots will be used for in 2050, because they'll be cheaper than sweatshops.

Wait, were you countering my statement or not? My statement was not about the robots if you read it, it was about the humans. Everyone pretty much assumes that robots will get better and better... What is your point, that robotics AI will stop being investigated?

Re:2050

[Anonymous Coward]

Theft is rampant in these parts.

Re:2050

[vertinox]

And in 2001 we are all going to be jetting around space, living in colonies on the moon. Why does everyone persist in making rediculous time-conditional statements about technology?

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 much.

However, robotics on the other hand is decentralized and has profit and political incentives to be created. Today, more money is being spend on robotics and AI by companies and governments around the world more than our space programs.

What robots and AI you say?

The ones that seem rather mundane and invisible.

DARAP with the grand challenge. Sony and all the factory robots. The Pentagon and all the development on unmaned drones and UAVs (see military robots). France and Sweeden are working on the Dassault Neuron, an unmaned jet fighter set to be put into service in 2015.

Not to mention all the Ai that goes into market forecasting, flight control, GPS satellites, and everything else that we don't see because it is invisible.

Robots and AI will happen soon because it makes better militaries and makes corporations profits without spending trillions of dollars on a single project that won't give us immediate returns in our wallets (aka the space program)

Re:2050

[pontifier]

That's so horrible!! What will all the sweatshop workers do when their jobs are replaced? they will surely go back to the streets and starve! or maybe that will make goods so cheap that they will be able to starve in their new nikes?

Re:2050

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of the advancements in robotics, I doubt that robotic soccer will surpass its human counterpart within at least the next centuries when it comes to popularity and general public appeal.

Real (general, non slashdotting) people simply find other real people more interesting and appealing than robots.

Re:2050

[mustafap]

I wonder what people 45 years ago would have made of the technology we use today? Why shouldn't technology 45 years in the future surprise us as much?

Press release for Sango and Ami

[technoextreme]

http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060608_robocup.ht ml The competition is not just about robots preforming soccer. There are two other events that are completely unrelated to soccer. One event is search and rescue and the newest competition involves domestic applications. PS. This is probably the only time I will ever watch a soccer event.

Re:Press release for Sango and Ami

[roman_mir]

This just maybe the only time I will ever watch a sports event. But does the word 'sports' apply in this case? I wanted to say it is more like an automated assembly line, but in this case the robots are not producing anything useful except data. I guess it is more like a research setting than a game.

Re:Press release for Sango and Ami

[riflemann]

PS. This is probably the only time I will ever watch a soccer event.

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 such a wide range of players is quite amazing. Many other sports require significant hardware outlay (American gridiron's a big culprit), but soccer runs on any hardware and is usable in any scale (analogous to Linux scaling from a home adsl router all the way to google)

Also the strategy required is almost mathematical, requiring careful player positioning and analysis of the opposing team, whilst also including elements of trigonometry.

Of course the commercial aspects are somewhat disagreeable (I'm not swayed by the adver^H^H^H^H^Hsponsors), but the game itself is good.

Robots will still have the advantage

[technoextreme]

In 2050, the question "Is a team of robots capable of beating a team of humans in football?" will be irrelevant (or at least very different from what it is now). What is a human? Do "cyborg-like" modifications to one's body allow him to be considered human? Etc etc...

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 slapdash manner. That arm which can lift a couple thousand pounds will rip the socket and pretty much kill you if you use it to the potential. Robots don't have that problem. PS. If you can guess where I learned this Ill give you a cookie.

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[rbarreira]

Good point, but the point still stands - I think that that question will be either irrelevant or will have a very different meaning in 2050...

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[roman_mir]

That arm which can lift a couple thousand pounds will rip the socket and pretty much kill you if you use it to the potential. Robots don't have that problem. PS. If you can guess where I learned this Ill give you a cookie. - you tried attaching an excavator backhoe to your torsoe? Let me guess, you are now typing with one hand?

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[RsG]

Let me guess, you are now typing with one hand?

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 can't improvise as well, and I suspect that football is simple enough that the extra processing power of a computer isn't needed.

Of course, that's assuming that we can't make an AI that is equal to a human mind in that regard, but I'd actually think that such an AI would be harder to develop than the cybernetics involved in creating a robotic body with a human brain. After all, a robot physically capable of playing football would probably be possible with modern technology, and I'd imagine that we'll have the technology to turn nervous signals into computer data before we have the technology to make a software program think like a human.

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[roman_mir]

well, if you don't have a limit on the poundage (excuse me, weight,) then the robots can win by default by dropping a trillion ton anvil on the opponent's goal.

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 ball into the barrel and shoot straight into the opponent's goal.

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[Prof.Phreak]

Yes. But they forgot to mention that by 2050, robots will run out of power a bit under 10 minutes into the game. So humans will have plenty of time to catch up.

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[RsG]

True, but all that assumes that whatever sport the robots are playing has no rules.

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

[jerald_hams]

Global Frequency?

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Well now the first thing is assuming we would start attaching things rather arbitrarily to our bodies without actually considering consequence. Truthfully if you attach a mechanical limb to your shoulder, and go and lift a car... you deserver the consequence. I'd assume humans would alter cyborgs much the same as anything else, IE if your arm can lift 2000lbs, then your skeleton would obviously have to be modified to support the strain as well. Right up untill the point where the stress would no longer affect your structure, IE your head could be completely biological because what does it have to lift?

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

I see where you're going with this. Have five robots just run around and kill all the humans while the sixth robot kicks the ball around and scores.

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[pontifier]

yes but in that 10 minutes they will have scored 700 goals...

power

[roman_mir]

Actually I don't doubt that from point of view of mechanics and programming robots that beat humans in all kinds of sport can be built, but will these robots have power cables running to them? Or will the robot team have to replace the batteries on each robot every 10 minutes, that is what I would like to know. How will these robots be powered? For the longest time it has been a tradition in sci-fi stories to have autonomous robots that don't need to recharge every 10 minutes, it is assumed that in the future the problem of battery capacity is somehow resolved. Some robots use built in fission plants, some use fusion plants, some use batteries of unexplained nature, but they can run for days or even years without recharging. If we could actually do something like that, then the life on this planet could become interesting again.

Re:power

[dvice_null]

We could start with Capacitors enchanted with nanotubes: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/ 09/073216

Re:power

[vertinox]

Or will the robot team have to replace the batteries on each robot every 10 minutes, that is what I would like to know. How will these robots be powered?

Why not fuel cells? Hydogen and elsewise? Perhaps carbon nanotube capacitors?

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 jet fighter so that it will have flight times of more than 20 minutes (which won't exist until 1944).

Re:power

[roman_mir]

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 jet fighter so that it will have flight times of more than 20 minutes (which won't exist until 1944). - maybe, or maybe not. Today we (humans) have enough knowledge to properly calculate energy requirements for any mechanism. We also have enough knowledge about energy carriers and principles of energy storage, we understand mass to energy, energy to mass conversions and we know that this is not a trivial problem that can be solved by trickery. There is a real dependency between energy storage size and the power it can provide. In this cases size and mass matters.

Re:power

[YA_Python_dev]

I was in a team that built a humanoid robot for the robocup a few years ago.
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 ;-)).

Re:power

[pontifier]

The fact that humans can get around for more than 20 minutes without "re-charging" demonstrates that there is no set of physical laws that makes this impossible.

Re:power

[roman_mir]

But a human cannot push 3 tons of steel at a constant speed of 150km/h for hours and hours and in fact for as long, as there is fuel.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Antimatter.

2050? Yeah, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe AI will advance to the point that a robotic team would win (more easily if they 'share thoughts'), but who foresees that in 40 years there will be robotic machines fast, light and flexible enough to play with humans? Soccer is a contact sport (maybe not as much as rugby, I know). Would you play against a plastics/metal body? Would any country or soccer club risk their players? Some of these guys will be worth more than the robots.

As a goal to encourage scientific progress it may be a good idea. As a practical matter, I don't think it is.

Re:2050? Yeah, right.

[CrazyJim1]

Would you play against a plastics/metal body?
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.

[Flyboy Connor]

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 AI. As most of us know, there has been very little progress in game AI in the last decade. Now scientists finally get involved, game AI competitions will help to increase the quality of the AI significantly. Game developers are usually guarding their ideas and code closely, as an industrial secret. It is no wonder that we have seen little progress from them. The event is still small, but hopefully it grows after its start this year.

The question still stands

[giorgiofr]

Can a working human mind ultimately be reduced to a complicated algorithm? Will we be able to emulate it, given the necessary computing power?

Re: The question still stands

[Black Parrot]

> Can a working human mind ultimately be reduced to a complicated algorithm?

That's a commonly held idea, though it isn't well established, and has its critics.

Re:The question still stands

[rbarreira]

In the worst case, we can always build bigger/faster biological brains... Now, the question is - could that be considered a robot or not?

Re:The question still stands

[giorgiofr]

Troll? WTF?! It was a perfectly legitimate question! Inviting dialogue and discussion! Seriously, mods... WTF?!

Re:The question still stands

[schweini]

yes.

Re:The question still stands

[Kjella]

Can a working human mind ultimately be reduced to a complicated algorithm? Will we be able to emulate it, given the necessary computing power?

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 information in the Library of Congress. That could read up and be a doctorate in every subject. That could learn all languages of the world.

It could very well skip several steps ahead of man simply by being able to see all of it at once. It would not only be an expert in the field, it'd also be an expert coder - that can create and run simulations and test scenarios at speeds we only can dream of. It can corrolate data and try to find logical explainations for them - to find new causations we haven't seen yet. Basicly the scientic method on steroids.

I have read a few books in my life, I have a Master's degree and I speak three languages. But when it comes down to it, I have only a microscopic part of all human knowledge. Even the true geniuses may be extremely impressive, but they too operate within their own little niche. It's simply a limitation of being human.

Another thing that would be very interesting would be ethics and morality - I doubt you will be able to code in anything like that into a thinking brain. In order to function it will have to be create it by itself to apply to the situation.Will it evolve one? Is it natural? Will it go Skynet on us?

An even stranger question is the goal - to what end would a computer brain exist? To reproduce? That's a rather stupid concept for a computer, and only exists in biological life because producing offspring is the only way to survive. Could it, like human-ethics try to do, reason itself to a purpose? Does it need a purpose? Other creatures have instincts but how could a computer have that?

In practise I think we're ages away from creating a functioning AI. But I think all it takes is that magic spark, the creativity and the ability to evolve. From there it'll take itself to where it needs to go. Simulating behavior, even very complex behaviour is good for creating simulated intelligence. But I don't think it brings us much closer to a truly intelligent computer.

You didn't learn that by experience did you? (n/t)

[Mateo_LeFou]

that is all.

Curious about a detail

[Mateo_LeFou]

Are any of the teams networked? It seems like coordination of action would be a *huge step forward

Re:Curious about a detail

[roman_mir]

Then it's no longer a team, it's a swarm. People also can have communications (I wonder if in team sports it is prohibited to use radios to communicate with the team members?) But people end up thinking on their own, of-course they work on the strategy and tactics before the match, and the coach is supposed to think through the strategy during the match and give advice, but there is no real swarm mind, it's only a team with people who do have independent thoughts and independent perception of reality. A swarm on the other hand would be like one organism with many eyes and many limbs. A swarm would beat a team anytime, unless the team becomes like the swarm (see Ender's Game for some discussion on this.)

Re:Curious about a detail

[rbarreira]

Football players communicate, and Robocup also allows communication (or at least it used to allow it a few years ago).

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).

Re:Curious about a detail

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they're networked, and various players have roles (or take on roles as opportunities arise, ie: when a player is close to a ball). The roles aren't the main point though---a huge chunk of the code is getting the sensors right (where is the robot, where is the ball, etc.), then the motion (did we really move when we told the legs to move---and how far?; did we fall over?). The team aspect is there, but it's overshadowed by everything else that might go wrong at this stage.

Re:Curious about a detail

[Anonymous Coward]

The robots are networked in different extents, depending on the league they play in:

• Simulation league
  There is some low-bandwidth communication allowed. (e.g. via shouting a limited amount of messages / minute)
  
• Small-size league
  Can communicate wirelessly, also with the team's external server. AFAIK, the computing power is usually located on that server instead of the robots.
  
• Middle-size league
  similar to small-size league
  
• Four-legged league
  The robots are autonomous, but can communicate with each other (through an AP). There is an external server, but it is only allowed to command "start" or "stop". It isn't allowed to tell the position of the ball or communicate strategies / announce passes / ...
  
• Humanoid League
  similar to four-legged league. The robots must still be able to play even if the communication stops.
  

In all leagues, bandwidth-restrictions apply.

(Assembled from the official rules at http://www.robocup.org/regulations/4.html)

Re:Curious about a detail

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in the 4-legged division (i.e. Aibo) communication is allowed, and the best teams use it to full advantage, e.g. for one dog to tell its teammates "I got it." The bandwidth, while limited, is less of a problem than finding the CPU cycles to spare to decode a message, interpret it, and decide whether or not to act on it. Teams that do communicate generally do much better than teams that don't, but it's hard to separate the effect of the fact that they're communicating from the fact that their other code must be much more efficient (and probably better) in order to allow them time to handle the communications.

Re:Curious about a detail

[odourpreventer]

Some additions/corrections:

• Small-size league: All units (four, if I remember correctly) are controlled by a separate server through radio. The units don't have any sensors; the server looks at the field through a camera located right above the field. Each unit is identified with a unique colour pattern on its "roof". This is by far the fastest and most action-packed league.
• Medium-size league: There isn't any server. All units are completely autonomous. Not sure about communication, but our units didn't have any in-team communication. For "seeing" our units had a camera looking up into a cone-shaped mirror, giving a 360-view of the field (standard nowadays), ultra-sound sonar mounted on the front, and a surrounding belt of IR sensors.

what wonderful spelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

onces?

For the 10000th time,

[Ireneo Funes]

It's called FOOTBALL.

Re:For the 10000th time,

[roman_mir]

For the 10^6th time, not in North America it ain't.

Re:For the 10000th time,

[ucblockhead]

Here's a hint, brainiac: different dialects often have different words for the same thing. Or do you go around yelling at Americans for talking about "apartments" or "cookies"?

Re:For the 10000th time,

[Dirtside]

It's called REGIONAL DIALECTS, you jackass.

Re:For the 10000th time,

[neo]

You do realize that this website resides in the United States. Odd as it may be we already had a sport called Football, or maybe we're just jerks. Either way, you know what we mean when we say Soccer and we have no idea what you mean when you say Football.

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,

[MamiyaOtaru]

Someone should inform the Socceroos.

Re:For the 10000th time,

[Anonymous Coward]

it's called ASSOCIATION FOOTBALL, which is shortened to SOCcer in the US and FOOTBALL in much of the other world.

How can you say one or the other is correct? Soccer is clearly preferable for its disambiguation with other games with football in the name.

Games as an AI research platform.

[Black Parrot]

> Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas.

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.

[Avian visitor]

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.

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 anything remotely advanced. When I asked them if no one uses such things they said that there were some experiments but "if" statements just work better in practice.

The Robocup competition I saw there didn't require any special AI or engineering skills from team members at all. All teams had identical robots that were mass-manufactured by some company. Image analysis software (for determining the position of the ball and robots with a video camera), communications software, etc. were also already written for them. The software didn't even have to be written with embedded systems in mind because it ran on a powerful PC (the robot itself was only a radio-controlled black box).

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.

Re: Games as an AI research platform.

[Black Parrot]

> 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 anything remotely advanced. [...] The Robocup competition I saw there didn't require any special AI or engineering skills from team members at all.

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 research!

Re:Games as an AI research platform.

[Flyboy Connor]

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.

[Lorkki]

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 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 most interesting entry to me so far has been MegaHAL, which applied Markov chains in modeling language and generating responses. It's definitely not a recipe for intelligent and coherent conversation, but the responses are more original and the approach is closer to what I believe ought to be the right direction. Too bad it didn't seem to stir the other participants enough.

Games and contests might be an entertaining way for demonstrating results of AI research, but seeing as us actual flesh-and-bone people have a habit of bending rules, it probably shouldn't be trusted too much as a platform for inspiring new research.

Yeah, right

[Clovert Agent]

"RoboCup 2006 is the first step towards a vision," said Minoru Asada, president of the RoboCup Federation.

"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

[Prof.Phreak]

They'll hard-wire the 3 rules of robotics by -then-.

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 :-D

Re:Yeah, right

[OpenSourced]

what it's like to be slide-tackled by a robot

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 well padded.

The other problem noted before, that of the batteries, will of course have to be solved by 2050 too, but I'm confident. If we can run a whole afternoon on a rice bowl, the solid fuel for robots cannot be that far away :)

Hmmm

[Aokubidaikon]

Even as a geek, all I have to say is:

Yawn.

robocup 2006 home page

[martyb]

The BEEB's blurb was interesting, but here is a link to the RoboCup 2006 home page

There are pics, background, schedules, leagues, etc.

Re:robocup 2006 home page

[NRISecretAgent]

2150 A Team of bio-engineered super humans with cybernetic addons will be competing against the reigning World Cup champions. Will this team be able to defeat their robotic counterparts or will they get destroyed by their opponents?

Silly northamericans.

[Anonymous Coward]

And who cares if north americans choose to call a game that is played with the foot soccer, while they choose to call a perverted form of rugby, which is primarily played with the hand, football?

So, it's played with the foot, it's called football all over the world, except for north america, hey, it's FOOTBALL!

Re:Silly northamericans.

[roman_mir]

So, it's played with the foot, it's called football all over the world, except for north america, hey, it's FOOTBALL! - A word means what you want it to mean. In North America apparently the word Football was first applied to American Football, and thus it stays Football. Since most people in North America don't care about Soccer, it will not be American Football that gets a different name.

Re:Silly northamericans.

[rbarreira]

Don't want to be a nag, but it's still a bit weird to call football to a sport played mostly with the hands...

Re:Silly northamericans.

[roman_mir]

Just thought of something. The robots that play this game, are they playing with feet or with hands? Can we even apply those terms to robots' body parts? They are definitely playing with lower appendages, maybe they are lower manipulators? So maybe robots are playing ManipulatorBall or Manipuball. Eewww, sounds dirty.

Re:Silly northamericans.

[zippthorne]

Me either, but it certainly is odd to call a sport football in which the ball is a nearly perfect sphere and not in any way shaped like a foot.

Re:Silly northamericans.

[Cymerc]

LOL OWNED!

Re:Silly northamericans.

[advocate_one]

what's the proper name for Rugby then??? Rugby Football... because it was the style of Football played at Rugby school...

The game of football as played at Rugby School (Rugby, England) between 1750 and 1823 permitted handling of the ball, but no-one was allowed to run with it in their hands towards the oppositions goal. There was no fixed limit to the number of players per side and sometimes there were hundreds taking part in a kind of enormous rolling maul.

The innovation of running with the ball was introduced some time between 1820 and 1830.

If William Webb Ellis's was responsible for this innovation as stated in Mr Bloxam's account, it was probably met by vigorous retribution but by 1838-9 Jem Mackie, with his powerful running, made it an acceptable part of the game although it was not legalized until 1841-2 initially by Bigside Levee and finally by the first written rules of August 28th, 1845.

Mr Bloxam was a student at Rugby School at the same time as Webb-Ellis but left some years before him. His account of what someone else witnessed (probably his brother) is the only evidence on which the story is based.

Re:Silly northamericans.

[operagost]

Don't want to be a nag, but it's still a bit weird to call football a sport played with a ball that looks nothing like a foot...

Re:Silly northamericans.

[roman_mir]

I am Canadian and you are an idiot. Soccer is a later invention than Rugby Football, that's first. Secondly I am only talking about North America and what this sport is called here, you dimwit.

Re:Silly northamericans.

[Ireneo Funes]

You're right!
Damn now I'm stuck trying to imagine what a ball rensembling a basket, a base, or a volley might look like.

Transgojobot is on his way. programmed

[reklusband]

to save the daaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!! (muppet babies reference)

North America?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_America

I guess around of 2/3 of North America calls it soccer...

Re:North America?

[roman_mir]

Way more than 2/3. From your link it is more than 99.999% by population and 89% by territory.
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.

A remark I forgot

[rbarreira]

Unfortunately I forgot to mention that, last I checked, the simulation competition of Robocup allowed communication but with a quite limited bandwidth. I don't know about the real-world competitions of Robocup.

It's over already

[SmilingBoy]

"As soccer fever continues the 10th RoboCup also got to a start."

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/ (in German).

SmilingBoy.

Re:Wrong. StrongAI will still have the advantage

[vertinox]

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 slapdash manner. That arm which can lift a couple thousand pounds will rip the socket and pretty much kill you if you use it to the potential. Robots don't have that problem. PS. If you can guess where I learned this Ill give you a cookie.

Actually, you are falling into the fallacy (as Ed at the Singularity institue calls it) anthromorphic assumtion. We assume that we as humans will be the same now as we are then and we assume that robots and humans have the same limitations today.

Lets say in 2050 we have a robot that can rip a regular humans arms of. Chances are that will be a given.

But whats the difference between a robot and a robot with a human brain inside of it that can rip a normal humans arms off? (think Ghost in the Shell)

Well besides the life support system and neural interface, changes are the robot and the cyborg are on equal footing. Heck... You could not even get rid of the human body, but have a neural interface to the humans mind while he sits in a room somewhere and controls the robot remotley.

But... The robot or should we say... AI (if they pull it off) will that the advantage over the human speed and tactical wise.

Lets say the goalie human cyborg being on equal strength of the robot can only guess and predict X amount of moves in X amount of seconds in determine where and where the robot is going to optimally kick the ball (and from which direction). If his mind is still organic without enhancements, he'll have to think at the speed of his synapses (1 to 120 meters per second) even with an electronic interface to robotic eyes or radar or whatever cyborg soccer players use to see in 2050. Then he has to use those neurons to fire off and communicate with his robot body.

The robot, having the disctinct advantage of being electronic through and through can use his computing power at the speed of electrons running from his eyes to his CPU and to his arms (which is near speed of light) and has the speed. Not only that the average human mind can not simply make more than 5 guess on the next best move. (Kasaprov the chess champion can do something like 12 next best moves).

So while the human goalie is trying to guess what the AI is going to do, the AI has already formulated all possible moves and has found the move he can make that will have the highest percentage of scoring a goal. Not only that he communicated this wirelessly to his robotic teammates and they are doing moves together in real time. That would be really hard for humans to do.

However, a cyborg human with AI assistants will have a better chance of finding the next best move.

Now of course you may wonder, how do we interface a human with a machine in the first place? We are doing it today small scale and the human body is fragile, but what is to say that in 45 years that they have figured out safe ways to interface the human mind to a machine and can even build life support systems that no longer needs the human body to keep a brain alive.

We have those kind of life support systems today and could make a complete "brain in a jar" if we really wanted, but it wouldn't be fun for the brain since we don't have thing to interface for communication.

Otherwise think of it like this... Today is 1906.

If we compare all the changes to life that happend from 1906 to 1946... We heavier than air flight, atomic bombs, mass production, radar, trasnatlantic flight and rockets. Who is to say that by 2050 we are going to have the limitations of what we have now when we are dealing with robotics and human interfaces.

Robo-cup...

[lmnoq]

I had an armor-plated hockey goaltender jock strap that I affectionately referred to as "robocup"

The real question is...

[Alicat1194]

How well will the robots be able to fake injuy?

Ow! Ref! The human just kicked me in my power coupler! The pain! The pain! ::convincing limp::...

Re:The real question is...

[Redwin]

How well will the robots be able to fake injuy?
Ow! Ref! The human just kicked me in my power coupler! The pain! The pain! ::convincing limp::...


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?

[antdude]

SomethingAwful's amusing doctored image with StarBucks' RoboCup!

"Careful, the beverage you're about to enjoy is extremely hot, Creep." --Jonah in RoboCop Archive forum thread.

Re:Prety much

[vertinox]

#include [soul]
#include [body]
#include [mind]

if (stomach == NULL)
        {
        findfood ( chips, pizza, burger); //i should add more options laters
        }
elseif(girlfriend == TRUE)
        {
          havesex(lighton, lightsoff, withmasks); //really now?
        }
elseif(slashdotreader == TRUE)
      {
        nothavesex(lookAtPorn, CleanKeyboard, BuyMoreKleenex);
        return 0;
      }

Why they chose soccer

[YA_Python_dev]

They chose soccer not because we need robots that play soccer, but because soccer requires almost all the capabilities currently missing from a useful robot: bipedal motion (for accessing places designed with humans in mind), coordination and collaboration between multiple robots, fast (fast for an humanoid robot means more than 0.1 m/s) and precise motion, and recognition of the position of mobile objects in the surrounding environment.

A few missing things are added by the Rescue League: recognition and movement in a complex unknown environment, and interaction with untrained humans.

And, of course, the soccer is also meant to stimulate the interest and competition in the robotics among the young minds.

Sure they'll win in 2050

[AugstWest]

They'll be armed with 3mm lasers.

Re:Sure they'll win in 2050

[pontifier]

Since intelligent robots might survive a nuclear war better than cockroaches, it'll be no contest at all...

the highest scoring player on every football team.

[YesIAmAScript]

Is the kicker.

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).

Bleh Making some faulty assumptions.

[technoextreme]

But whats the difference between a robot and a robot with a human brain inside of it that can rip a normal humans arms off? (think Ghost in the Shell)

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.

The robot, having the disctinct advantage of being electronic through and through can use his computing power at the speed of electrons running from his eyes to his CPU and to his arms (which is near speed of light) and has the speed. Not only that the average human mind can not simply make more than 5 guess on the next best move. (Kasaprov the chess champion can do something like 12 next best moves).

Yeah but AI researchers are tending to move away from this idea completely or use more of a reactive paradign combined with the ability to predict certain situations. It's just simply too fragile of a method for it to ever really to standoff on it's own.

Robocup is the coolest thing on the planet...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

... and America could careless :(

This stuff should be on tv every year in full coverage real time coverage.

Re:Robocup is the coolest thing on the planet...

[antispam_ben]

... and America could careless :(

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.

MegaHAL is great

[Nurgled]

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

[Lorkki]

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. Changing the function for picking the reply to some sort of gaussian distribution would probably improve it, but I haven't tried.

I did have some fun experimenting with a Python implementation I made, coupled with MontyLingua for adding word classification into the training process. Even then it eventually runs into the obstacle that the Markov model really only puts words into a short context within a sentence; it doesn't "think", nor can it hold topics beyond what the user carries on in his sentences.

2050 ?

[uarch]

"The organizers of the tournament hope that in 2050 the winners of the RoboCup will be able to beat the human World Cup champions"

Not unless they have humans competing against DARPA Grand Challenge entries that keep mistaking them for speed bumps.

Now that Sony has retired the Aibo...

[braindrainbahrain]

...what does this mean for the future of the four-legged league?