BattleBots Delayed, Will Go Brains Over Babes

An anonymous reader writes "We got all excited earlier this week about robo-combat returning to TV with ESPN, but now PopMech super geek Erik Sofge talks to the folks at BattleBots and finds out that because of so many early entries, the competition will be delayed until at least November. The reason? Gone are the babes and predictable wedge fights, in are eager engineering students, a crazy ramp arena and lots of new rules. Worth the wait, or do we miss the Comedy Central version?"

Comments

Till the fighting is autonomous, I don't care

[spagthorpe]

Watching some people running RC cars around a battle arena has zero interest for me. I watched the first episode back when it started, and then would occasionally hit it channel surfing, and it was lame IMHO. I understand what goes in to building the bots, and yes, that has some geek factor to it. Good job on the construction guys.

I would much rather see people putting some time into some programming, and letting the bots fight each other based on it. Anyone who grew up playing something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotwar, knows that it doesn't have to be anything super sophisticated, you don't need neuralnets and/or computer vision to pull this off. Sometimes a simple search and destroy algorithm can work. I guess it might not have the instant gratification if immediate combat a energy-drink infused audience might require. I think it could start an entire new generation into thinking about machine interaction, and who knows what kind of solutions could come out of it.

Call me when it gets interesting.