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Lego Robot Plays Tetris
kkleiner writes "What's the surest sign that robots aspire to be more like humans? They play video games. The Tetris-Bot operates completely without human interference to play games of old school Tetris on a computer. Creator Branislov Kisacanin patched together a webcam, a digital signaling processing board, and some NXT Lego as a fun educational project for his kids."
But THIS is why I read slashdot. All that other news stuff is just fluff.
A robot doesn't "aspire" to anything. They're frigging electronics, metal and plastic.
Sent from your iPad.
So will someone make Tetris blocks out of legos and come up with a robot that plays Tetris physically, perhaps even in 3d?
Dating myself a little here (although this is /., we all date ourselves amirite?), but when I was younger, the Amiga was in my room. For good, most of the time, but occasionally I'd wake up at 3 am and find one or both of my parents hunched over the keyboard, clicking away in the darkness, waiting for that goddamn green one to show up before the stack got too high. They had a pretty serious addiction.
Poor robot.
Haida Manga
On a closely related note, here's another video of a tool-assisted playing of Tetris, with an interesting mystery to it:
Clicky
It won't make sense at first, but once you get it, you'll see a little more art in the art of video games.
Ryan Fenton
This means that soon we will be able to play Tetris against an AI opponent. No more of this "Tetris Friends" thing.
This is a (probably expensive) DSP decoding the video and then the lego robot figuring out how to move. Give that robot some vision of its own, and I'll be more impressed.
Can it play Hell?
to say that I flee our new robotic overlords! I figure that this can only mean that both the Mayans and John Cameron were partially correct. The end of days will happen in December 2012 like the Mayans predicted, but it will be due to Skynet achieving self awareness, not any kind of cosmic alignment. I have to admit it is sort of sad to see that mankind will be hunted down by terminators constructed from small Danish building blocks, and not the cool steel cyborgs depicted in the films.
Pretty lame. You have a game that is basically some blocks that are placed somewhere. Lego is a a toy that places blocks some place. Wake me when tetris is not on the screen, but actual lego.
(OK, I am just jealous)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Cue cease and desist letter from Henk Rogers in 3... 2...
Would've been more fun to see this idea paired with Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand we saw a few weeks back... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk
Teaching a lego robot to play tetris is basically teaching it how to procreate. Pretty soon it won't need humans to manufacture it's own army of tetris bots to take over the world.
I've thought about this back in the days of Pacman and Defender about the feasibility of creating a machine with vision and mechanical access to the controls of a game if it could be taught to play indefinitely (at least for the games that had no real end).
I don't think this is the first time it has been applied to Tetris. But it shouldn't be hard to solve Space Invaders. Asteroids would be an interesting challenge. A computer playing Centipede perfectly would be very impressive (if it had to physically spin the trackball).
Of course there are games that get ridiculously difficult such that no one could ever play them indefinitely without infinite credits (Off Road would get to the point where you needed to constantly hit the Nitro 99 times to practically fly around the course, and still the grey computer car would manage to set record times beating you, and which you'd have to buy-in to refill).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
... thou it deserves a way better tetris algorithm. The current one fails a lot, specially for level 1.
For all the tech geeks out there interested in volunteering there is a great program called First Lego League to help gets kids get excited about technology. The program uses the Lego NXT kit like in the video. Legos + robotics + getting kids excited about technology = win.
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/fll/content.aspx?id=13056
...and they also put the (unused) sonar sensor on top the robot to make it look more human.
would like to welcome our Tetris playing robotic overlords!
I'm surprised no one had said it!
I'd rather be impressed if someone combined Intelligent TETRIS with Bastet. It would be interesting to see if itetris' smartness could beat Bastet's evilness.
It'd be interesting to make a bot like this that plays MMOs or something equally repetitive -- is that against terms of service? How would they know?
I remember making a "robot" to beat Ruby Weapon in FF7, which consisted of a coffee cup pressing the X button -- the fight took 2 hours thanks to summon animations.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
...So a robot made of bricks playing a game, in which bricks fall down... nice touch...
Until the skies turn blue...
Until the air of freedom strikes us...
A bot to do this for a more complicated games like FPSs would be interesting. To play well would involve solving a number of AI/computer vision problems. The bot would have to pick out enemies from the image it was seeing, it would have to figure out where it was on the map from visual cues and determine where to go, and so on. It would be a simplification of the problem of creating a robot that can intelligently navigate its environment, with the actual physical robot abstracted away to "push the stick forward to run."
Sorry folks, but while I'm a total n00b when it comes to robots, I believe I could come up with a much better Tetris solving programm in a single day. Is it just me or is that bot really bad at Tetris?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Of course it can be solved with a simple algorithm. Using peripherals made for humans, of course makes it harder, but in this case not very much.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Anyone know anything about the AI behind this? Tetris is NP-Complete, so how is it solving it?
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.