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Street Fighting Robot Challenge
ianchaos writes "There's no better way to assure the eventual destruction of mankind than by the event sponsored by Singapore's Defence Science and Technology Agency. Newscientist has a good writeup of the robot challenge, which is to build a robot that can operate autonomously in urban warfare conditions, moving in and out of buildings to search and destroy targets like a human soldier."
Oh yeah? Well Al Quida is countering with suicidal robots with bomb belts. So there!
Table-ized A.I.
Do you realize that our military may then get slashdotted in the middle of a battle?
Table-ized A.I.
Where's robocop when you need him?
Based on the trend, probably in California politics of some kind.
Table-ized A.I.
Let's just start with a robot which can move in & out of buildings and *identify* targets.
I can't lie. The inner 14-year-old suburban white male in me thinks this kindof rules.
I am an employee of DSTA, but I do not speak in my capacity as one.
The purpose of such contests is typically not to field an operational capability. It is very unlikely that the winning robot or a variant will actually be deployed. The main purpose is to encourage industry and academia to perform research in certain fields, such as machine vision, control systems, AI, etc. This is a long term investment. The secondary purpose is to gauge the state of the art in these fields while advancing it. This is the short term gain.
The contest is modelled after the DARPA Grand Challenge, which concentrates on outdoor navigation. Similarly, you will not see autonomous combat vehicles anytime soon. However, DARPA has certainly focussed interest and effort toward all the fundamental research questions needed to achieve such a feat. DARPA also now has a good idea of what is possible when planning acquisitions and upgrades, and is able to better assess the technical risk of new developments. If the US Army asked for an autonomous UGV tomorrow, DARPA would be able to give a good estimate of how much it would cost, how long it would take, and what is realistically achievable (then the politicians will come in and screw things up).
Such contests are an admission that the state of the art is no longer in the military or intelligence communities, but in the acadamic and industrial spheres. AES was developed outside the NSA, for example. More and more equipment is COTS or MOTS (commercial / militarized off-the-shelf). The days when you could get a national laboratory (Singapore has one too) to singlehandedly advance the state of the art are long over. Nowadays inhouse research tends to be focussed on either security-sensitive fields, or areas no one else simply wants to touch. This trend will only accelerate in the future.
You can't put a price on life.
Not to nitpick too much, but people put a price on life all the time. Now, if you want to say that we shouldn't put a price on life, that's possibly another story.
I think you do raise some interesting points and I agree with a lot of what you have to say, but ultimately I have to feel like it's a little overly optimistic/naive. I don't, for example, really see people who currently shelter violent terrorists shunning them if their crimes were to be known, because said people probably don't share your/our view of what constitutes innocent victims. How great it would be if the solution to all problems was just to tell people the truth, but I don't think that's the world we live in.
Obligatory Simpsons: Salesman: Surely you can't put a price on your family's lives?
Homer: I wouldn't have thought so either, but here we are.
1st RULE: Terminal will not transmit data about ROBOT FIGHT CLUB.
2nd RULE: Terminal WILL NOT transmit data about ROBOT FIGHT CLUB.
3rd RULE: If command "HALT" executed, or terminal fails to respond, or gives hardware error code the fight process will be killed.
4th RULE: Only two robots to a fight.
5th RULE: One fight per session.
6th RULE: No shirts, no shoes.
7th RULE: Fights will go on as long as required to complete the operation.
8th RULE: If this is terminal's first session at FIGHT CLUB, the terminal MUST fight.