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See Giant Robots Fight. US vs Japan Match On YouTube (cnbc.com)
AmiMoJo writes: Suidobashi Heavy Industries and MegaBots agreed to test their piloted giant robots in combat a few years back, and the content is finally available on YouTube. It ended in a draw, with Japan decisively winning the first bout with a single punch and the US team winning the second thanks to a chainsaw weapon. There have been some complaints that the whole event felt scripted, but it's early days yet. ITMedia has a nice gallery of photos from the event.
"The MegaBots team expressed hope for a formal fighting robot league in the future," reports CNBC.
That was the lamest thing I've seen all day. And to set the bar, I'm a middle-aged dad who just got back from a Pokemon Go raid.
That's because it was scripted. It's about as real as a WWE fight, and about four times more boring.
Wheel loader fight
Done in under two minutes, without the 25 minutes of vapid hype from dressed-up twits wearing sunglasses inside.
Haha, the first punch is ridiculously dumb, KO. Just skip everything except the fighting, there are 2 matches in the video. The first is 2 seconds long. The second is actually kinda cool, it's at least funny, they do some damage and almost kill the annoying announcers, too bad they didn't. These kinds of things would be SO much better if they didn't overhype it like it's going to be so amazing.
Spoiler alert: That shit wasn't even a one punch affair. One bot passed gas and the other tipped him over! Seriously, this shit feels like the Geraldo Rivera fiasco of the 80s. A ton of build up, with no delivery.
How about a good link that skips the bullshit and goes right to the fight? https://youtu.be/Z-ouLX8Q9UM?t...
From the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
First fight starts at 8:32. Fight is over at the very first punch at 8:55. I use "punch" loosely, as the robot just holds an arm out and runs forward into the 2nd one, knocking it over.
Slow motion of the "punch" is at 10:26-11:00.
Next fight with another robot starts around 13:20. Drone gets knocked out of the air at 14:18. Robot-on-robot hits around 15:00, after which they pause for round 2. Battle resumes at 20:00, this time with a chainsaw attachment. Chainsaw damage starts around 21:20. But it is low-speed, not very exciting. Knock some shit over at 22:04, and the whole thing ends at 22:30.
There you go. For $200k-$2m and change you too can have a winning mech!
One comment from a youtuber...
"And here we see the rival males fighting for the right to mate. These battles are not deadly, but instead, a male that is pushed on his side has lost."
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I am certainly not interested in Transformers-like robots, fights (of robots) or similar. I cannot even imagine that what is being shown in that video could trigger reactions like what any similar enough event could do. But all this might even be ignored to understand the point I am trying to make here.
I have always had serious difficulties to understand this kind of businesses requiring a huge amount of funding and eventually (if at all) having some profit which can rarely compensate that initial funding; in fact, this is usually a way to get even more funding?! Perhaps this is because I am (kind of) poor and because losing more than earning doesn't seem too logical to me. Perhaps because I have had horrible experiences with financial/money-lending institutions, with their impatience, unmotivatedly pushy behaviours and their absolute lack of understanding about almost anything (they give you 3, expect 5 in return and very quickly; in case of not getting it, they start having bully-like attitudes by spending in that process even more than the profit of 2 that they were expecting to get! And all that for not-too-big, even small amounts! I know that these extreme behaviours are common in my area/country, but not everywhere; even though they seem quite descriptive of what these people are usually up to). So, I have serious problems to picture what is somehow common in certain areas like Silicon Valley or businesses backed by huge amount of VC capital. Even despite all that, this seems a new upper limit for me on this let's say peculiar approach to the world.
I did a quick research and this company seems to have a maximum audience of around 250K people (what they claim and about the number of subscribers in their Youtube channel; in other social media, their numbers are much lower). They seem to have got various millions of dollars in funding from companies like Autodesk (for promoting AutoCAD?). They have a Kickstarter campaign to fund this specific battle, where they got a bit over $500M. Their whole business model seems to be focused on selling merchandising and making these videos. Their expenses seem to be quite big, not just to build all the robots (currently looking for hiring engineers for various positions) but also to gain all this visibility. Just by taking this battle as an example, they spent 3 years to be in a position to record that 30 min. video!
It seems that their ultimate goal is to be the pioneers in what they think that will be the very lucrative business of robot fights. To have an impression of what this might imply, let's take as a reference professional wrestling. Apparently, it went though a quite long and difficult process before becoming popular/profitable; although nowadays and with enough money the process might certainly be much quicker, something like 10-20 years under ideal conditions? Let's imagine for one second that robot fights have already reached that stage of popularity and that battles like the one shown in that video might attract millions of fans. This is the ideal output for all this, the final prize justifying the huge invested amounts and all the effort. Even by assuming that this point is actually reachable and that all the losses to get there are affordable, the question is: could seriously this format become profitable at all? Professional wrestling seems profitable, but not extremely profitable; I guess that the most successful investors, managers, fighters, etc. are reasonably wealthy but this is it. And that is the maximum aspiration of robot fights: getting as much attention as the human equivalent. The problem with robots is that they imply much higher expenses than people; I don't know, something like 100 times, 1000 times more? They need specific conditions, highly specialised staff to build, fix, improve them; there are huge entrance barriers for new fighters (and without contenders you don't have battles or a tournament or anything even remotely attractive for your a
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