Robots Aim To Top Humans At Air Hockey

An anonymous reader writes "You probably knew that the Deep Blue supercomputer beats chess masters, and that last weekend a software robot defeated four poker champions. But you may have missed this one: a GE Fanuc robot is taking on humans at air hockey. The robot is powered by a special PC-board that can instantly switch between 8-bit and its 32-bit modes. The 8-bit version lost to most human players, but the 32-bit microcontroller has defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of three to one."

Comments

Am I the only one who wants to take it on?

[Dr. Spork]

I would love to see this in an arcade. I'd pay a dollar to play the arm - bring on the 32bit mode! If they could make the arm fold itself out of the way while two people are playing, this would make an excellent arcade machine.

What's more, if the arms were standard and mass-produced, there's a great excuse for a little coding competition: Whose program will win when it's robot v. robot?

Lots of cool AI, artificial learning and computer vision would go into it, and the result would no doubt be fun to watch!

Re:Robots also top humans at arm wrestling..

[nfk]

"Honestly, it's not as if some robot is paintaing abstract art or writing poetry here."

You picked a couple of interesting examples; I'm sure robots could paint abstract art and write poetry that would match some of today's offerings by human beings. Anyway, I have no idea how complex it is to program a robot to play air hockey, and whether it involves only strength and precision, but there was an idea I read in a book by Douglas Hofstadter that I find amusing: artificial intelligence is always defined as whatever a machine cannot do yet.