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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."
Bender: Now, Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern-hitting machine.
Leela: Exactly. He was a machine designed to hit blerns.
How is a robot supposed to get a bear to stand still and open its mouth to throw in a ping pong ball?
Bear pong?
Squirrel pong, sure; monkey pong, any day; but bear pong? That's where I draw the line.
I refuse to be impressed.
I can create a 2 bit air hockey robot that will lose to everyone but Butters!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Good thing you cleared that up, I thought it meant hitting a grizzly back and forth across a table.
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Do you really want robots out there who can check you into the boards and beat you in a fight?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'll be worried when they can beat us at Dodge the EMP Blast.
They could make a robot that beats human players at air-hockey but they were not able to make a watchable video or it in action? I guess it is all about specialization.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
This must be one of the best ways to get a research grant to pay for an air hockey table I've ever heard.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
Honestly, it's not as if some robot is paintaing abstract art or writing poetry here.
Robots exceeding humans in strength and precision when designed to do so is not news, it's our technology "working as intended".
If they didn't exceed human strength or precision, i'd expect articles like "engineer blacklisted as incompetent for designing defective robotics"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
if that was the case I'm sure robots would be able to beat us quite easily.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
First they're beating us at chess, then at air hockey... pretty soon they're rolling around yelling "EX..TER..MI..NATE", disintegrating us, and avoiding staircases.
This is how the human race ends, mark my words.
(Yeah, I know, the Daleks are supposed to be cyborgs. Roll with it, it's supposed to be a joke.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I for one welcome our meme-devising robotic overlords.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I don't think I'd want to play foosball against a robot. Imagine how hard a robot would be able to jam the pole into your junk when he grabbed the wrong handle.
Humans can still score on it occasionally, so they're `beating' it in that sense. But overall, it still wins more than it loses.
Statistically speaking, if it averages 3x the score of it's opponents, a human should be able to beat it once in a while -- it just hasn't happened yet.
I don't know about bears and open mouths, but I'm sure the Japanese are working on a robot that can beat all human challengers at tonsil hockey.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
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!
And thanks for demonstrating the neurological effects of playing beer pong.
Actually, to be fair, it's very likely that similar malfunctions are also the cause of playing beer pong. Researchers originally thought that positive feedback was initiated by "pledging" a social fraternity/sorority, but it now seems most likely that "pledging" is itself but a symptom of a congenital defect.
The evolutionary advantage for the species is obvious: when defective organisms have a tendency to clump together and disable their higher cognitive functions en masse by imbibing excessive quantities of ethanol, then they can be easily eliminated through mass extermination.
However, there is associated risk: if extermination fails, the defectives may begin interbreeding, thus evolving a subspecies, supertards, which may begin undermining the species' broader social organization, due to the supertards' natural inclination for the lowest-skilled activities---business management, marketing, politics---which are, terrifyingly, activities with great potential for reducing the overall species' quality of life if not bounded and carefully monitored by more intelligent organisms.
The results of careless monitoring could be disastrous. In a "perfect storm" scenario, where the supertards are allowed to impress their opinions upon large groups via mass communication and positions of power, then humanity's classical value system could actually be inverted! Imagine, a world where sports, entertainment, and consumerism are deemed more important than science, philosophy, and art! Where responsibility is shunned, work avoided, and a sense of entitlement the rule! Where xenophobia is disguised as religion, and religion derided by faux-scientific antireligion! Where film actors, instead of being recognized as glorified circus clowns, are given society's highest respect & obsessive admiration! Where full-time sportsman, instead of being mocked for wasting their lives, are beloved "heroes" whose salary is greater than the aggregate salaries of entire university faculties! Where conspicuous consumption is a substitute for cultural tradition! Where public schools are run by political committees and unions! Where the front page of Yahoo! recounts last night's television schedule alongside news of war and natural disaster! I could go on, but why? You see the horrors we could face if the extermination of supertards were to be forgotten.
I certainly hope that never happens.
Only if they're fembots - ooooh
I was going to use a mod point here but there's no "+1 Probably True" option.
Donkey Pong?
Huh?
From wikipedia:
Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NNEMP) is an electromagnetic pulse generated without use of nuclear weapons. There are a number of devices to achieve this objective, ranging from a large low-inductance capacitor bank discharged into a single-loop antenna or a microwave generator to an explosively pumped flux compression generator. To achieve the frequency characteristics of the pulse needed for optimal coupling into the target, wave-shaping circuits and/or microwave generators are added between the pulse source and the antenna. A vacuum tube particularly suitable for microwave conversion of high energy pulses is the vircator.
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