Slashdot Mirror
World Championships in Robot Soccer
fACTOR writes "The Robot World Cup is an initiative to encourage research in artificial intelligence and robotics by applying the new technology to the world's most popular sport -
soccer. If this idea takes off, maybe pro sports salaries will drop, and there will be a new kind of job created: "sports robot programmer."
Absolutely dead right there! Football is real football. In Ireland we have Gaelic Football (or simply a game of Gaelic). In the U.S. its American Football - but there is only one true Football game.
This isn't the same competition.
The article posted on slashdot is about the RoboCup, this isn't that. But it's the same as the small-robot part of the RoboCup.
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It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Then it's just fun.
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It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Then it's just fun.
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Anyone at the Rochester Institute of Technology doing this in a mechanical engineering major? I saw their pictures on the wall once of small AI robots playing soccer. There were also display models in the glass case.
Further, I do not claim that some things that have come out of AI research have proved useful, linked lists, and expert systems are two good examples. But what do linked lists have to do with making something think?! While in the past there were some good ideas in AI (GAs, Neural Nets), these were done to death in the 70s and early 80s. There is nothing I am aware of now that is significantly in advance of what people were doing 25 years ago.
WRT what I know about that joke project, my knowledge is gleaned from an hour long lecture given to us by the girl that did it, she also answered some questions that I put to her as a result of my disblief at how lacking in creativity the whole thing was (although I was more polite at the time!). I stand by my belief that NOTHING was learned about intelligence from that, and many other such projects, other than how not to achieve it.
The definition of Artificial Intelligence you point to is cyclical. It defines itself in terms of "Intelligence" (see first line!). Any dictionary that used part of the phrase it was defining in the definition would be laughed at, I think this definition deserves the same treatment. Minskey's definition is the same. Show me a definition of AI that doesn't used words that themselves require just as much clarification as "Artificial Intelligence" does, and I will eat my hat (or would if I had one).
I have no problem with young fields per se, I just have a problem with young fields that aren't even trying to grow up.
I know that there are other undergraduate courses in Europe that cover AI, but how many of them are taught by an actual AI department?
PS. Where did you do your MSC? Edinburgh?
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From your description, that was the AUVS (Assoc. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems) Aerial Robotics Competition from 1997 at Epcot, Orlando, FL.
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My college (UCF) took third place in '97, and hasn't done much since then. We still have the airframe and it flies, but the control electronics are ripped apart right now.
Best start site for more info:
http://avdil.gtri.gatech.edu/AUVS/IARCLaunchPoint
Summary: The competition is much more challenging now. It's a truly hostile environment...
Pictures and stuff from my uni are at:
http://www.engr.ucf.edu/clubs/auvs/
Rick 'email me w/ questions' Evans
Well, baseball is pretty boring anyway, but it is more than just one country, it's not our fault that no-one wants to join . . .
later
Dan
It's a more violent, primitive game, at least.
/El Niño
AIBO is sold out.
The full page for the RoboCup competition has lots of info, including results from last year's competition.
And it looks like we'll be able to see 2d and 3d renderings of the simulator league, when the logs are available.
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It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Then it's just fun.
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It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Then it's just fun.
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on one hand i agree that robo soccer is somewhat of a toy domain, and that work done on that problem may not scale up to real-life situations. but on the other, i think your extrapolation of the state of ai from that one project is a bit short-sighted.
i can completely understand your frustration with the lego kits. when the robot's perception consists of only touch sensors, IRs, and maybe a sonar or two, it's going to hit a performance wall really early. the simple fact is, there's only so much you can do with such limited perception. in order to do anything of research quality, you will need much more than that - real-time vision and a ring of sonars, for example. not to mention you'll need to endow the robot with some reasoning about the environment, which is rather difficult with the C/assembly tools that are used for microcontroller programming.
lego kits are fine as an introduction to robotics, and to disillusion people - that sensors are really noisy, that the environment rarely follows your assumptions about it, that you can't trust your perception, and that to duplicate even the most simple of human behaviors you need much more cognitive processing than basic systems provide. but robotics research, while facing more difficult problems, also doesn't work under the constraints of lego kits. consider the systems that are in operation right now, like museum tour-guide robots in bonn, the mars pathfinder project, and delivery bots at many hospitals and research facilities. it's a world of difference.
My other car is a cons.
all right, let's start a holy war. :)
first of all, artificial intelligence is not a theoretical field, but a science. unlike in theory fields (math, theory of cs), you can't just expect everything to be neat and clear and derivable from first principles. just remember how many centuries (millenia?) it took to come up with a reasonable model of the atom. we can't expect a reasonable model of the mind to just pop up overnight. for every brilliant insight there is a dozen detours. such is the way of science.
and secondly, re your comment of ai being an ill-defined field - it's not the field that's ill-defined, it's the definition of intelligence that keeps changing on us! back in the 50s, when first ai systems were born, people actually considered intelligence to be equivalent to formal inference, spatial reasonoing, and so on. but as computers started getting good at those, the definition kept changing, as if to exclude what computers were doing - people started realizing: what about emotions, what about social skills, what about pragmatics? but this is a vicious epistemological circle - ai trying to model intelligence which is constantly being redefined because of ai's successes. to blame ai for this circle would be as foolish as blaming mathematics for people's fear of differential equations. the question should be how to break it.
My other car is a cons.
What's really cool is that the Sony AIBOs were actually given their own league in this competition. They really can do more than just get up when they fall down.
Carnegie Mellon University has been winning most of these competitions in the past few years - check out the team's project leader's web page here.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
You're right, it must be a 'World Series' if Canada is involved. I mean.. that makes _two_ countries.
Wow.
hmmm, I'm in an oi band, I'm almost considering writing some hooligan songs and releasing them as mp3's.
hmmm.
-Ben
bensmith@biz1.net
My bad! Who'd of thought that there were >1 Robot competition? :) I suck, overrated yes, troll no.
A US based high school robotics design competition already exists. The idea is to make engineering, math and science as popular as any physical sport. Students team with volunteer engineers from sponsor companies to build a robot designed for that years competition. National finals are held at Epcot Center in Orlando Florida. More info on the website USFirst.org
Now I really need to get those Legos. Esp the sports add-on package. Part of me always wanted to be a sports hero :)
-cpd
Such an astounding apocoliptic event and all you have to post is "1st post!!!"?!?! Have you lost your mind man? What is this world comming to? I thought this was a country For the people By the people, not a County to enslave and violate the people. Hell they might as well be taking a shit on the Statue of Liberty, and wipping with the Flag. Yea, I know it's unlikly to happen, but so was prohabition, and look what happened! My copy of PGP is safe, old 2.6 version for dos!! I say FUCK the government, it's crumbeling, lets smack it with a 20lb sledge and watch it fall like the Berlin Wall!! Hmm, I wonder what those Cryptoburner guys think! Wonder if someone can get an interview with Phil Zimmerman on the subject? A /. exsclusive maybe?
Ok, Im done rambeling, everyone go write your congressman just to piss them off or something!
You're gonna get your fucking bolts unscrewed
You'll never roll alone
There's only 1 Kryten 523C, but he's got a 30-day guarantee and can be returned in the original packaging for a replacement
I just KNEW that learning to program that tank in Origin's Omega would pay off! Next job, program a robotic hockey player to start fights and make outrageous salary demands!
In my opinion most current research in AI is non-creative rubbish. I am not unqualified to make such a statement given that I went through probably the only, and almost definitely the best respected undergraduate degree involving AI in Europe, and am an ex-president of the Edinburgh University AI Society. If there was one thing I learned from it is that most people doing AI research are either kids who just think it sounds cool, but don't have the intelligence or creativity to progress the field one little bit, or they would rather talk about AI than actually do anything about it.
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Here's an interesting article on two Canadian students taking on MIT and Sony just to name a few in this competition. (picture of robots included)
http://www.ottawacitizen.co m/hightech/990726/2648889.html
ok,m something fuckedup, this was suposed to go under a totaly different topic, dont know what happened, must be a glitch in the matrix
I mean, we've already made great advances in the field of robot boxing with Rockem Sockem Robots. We should finish that before going on to make robot soccer players, and the inevitable artificial riots.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I have to admit, when I heard this was being held in Brazil I felt a little upset. It was sputnik all over, you kow? Obviously it affected you in the same way. fahkink for'ners.
The 20lb sledge idea would be very interesting. hard to implement though, except in the sony bots.
Once robot soccer gets old, what sport will replace it? I'm voting for ice hockey.
Why do they even bother to do this competition any more? Everyone knows that CMU is just going to beat everyone again!
-NooM
I just don't think they could compete...
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Makes me think of the game One Must Fall, where there are fighting tournaments between different people's robots.
Yeah that would be very interessting to see....
Guess Bill Gates will have something new to takeover then.
There is no strategy in AF (merry-can football :-).
There are simple tactics, which never really affect anything outside the game that they're played in.
Also, there is far more, tactically, to football (soccer to merry-cans) than to AF. It's more subtle, but also more pervasive (I just WISH that our team would learn some...). Besides that, players need to be fit all round, rather than body builders that can run a little :-)
That said, for a real game, with real rules, where players don't answer back to the umpire when a decision goes against them, you can't beat cricket.
John
John_Chalisque
I remember watching a Scientific American Frontiers on Robotics a couple of years ago, in which various things were discussed (Cog was shown, as well as that other Brooks bot that has the funny looking face that can express suprise, etc).
One of the things that was shown was a competition at some school for making a robot that could fly, pick up a disk out of a ring, transport it over a three foot wall, and put it in another area - all under autonomous control.
One of the teams got really close - but couldn't release the ring (some High School entered a radio controlled blimp, that wasn't autonomous, that worked ok too), and so didn't complete the task.
They said that they were going to compete the next year - and from what I understand - they had an idea on releasing the ring. What I want to know is, does anyone know if this feat has been done yet, and who won it?
It sounds simple on the surface - but hard in practice from what I have seen...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
When a robot can outplay Omar Vizquel at shortstop or Ken Griffey, Jr. in center field, then I'll be impressed. :^)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Have a new "World Cup of Women's Robotic Soccer"
and hold it in Pasadena. Then at the end have the
robot whose penalty kick shot ices the win whip off
its jersey showing a jog-bra underneath.
Yes, it's a joke. But how else will the winners
get on the covers of Time, Newsweek et al.?
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
I'd like to see those fat bastard "Football" players run around for 90 minutes. Ha! Soccer is a little more strategic than running into other people.
I remember there was a episode of the
Jetsons in which there was an "american style"
football game played by robots, and
programmed by the coach live on the sidelines.
What a visionary show!
At least spectators at American football games remain just spectators instead of cases of some European soccer games where fans of the sport sometimes have to run away from the British fans to stay alive! It would suck (needless to say) to die at an event that should be fun.
AC
This reminds me a lot of a similar competion that I was in during high school. Check out the FIRST site for more info. It affected one friend of mine to the effect that she realized she was a geek and is going to major in EE starting this fall. :)
I did not intend to be anonymous but I haven't been mailed my password yet. I am the Übermonkey!
Yeah, flamebait, I know, but then we are talking about a country that has a "world" series where only one nation competes :-)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Offtopic, but what the hell, this piques my interest =)
>Makes me think of the game One Must Fall,
>where there are fighting tournaments between
>different people's robots.
Hehe, OMF2097 rocks. I think it's the only Street Fighter clone I was ever able to play without getting my ass kicked, prolly because I played it enough to figure out the moves and tactics. It was a hilarious idea they had to have robots' nuts and bolts flying around everytime they got hit instead of the increasing quantities of blood in all the other games. I still think the Jaguar was the best bot, had a good reach on the normal attacks.
Ever play the original OMF? IIRC, it had two Ken-clones in front of a sunset background, and you could change the computer's offence and defensive skill. They had some pretty nifty moves too, I wonder what those guys have done since then. Guess it's time to do a web search on Ryan and Rob Elam. (Criminy, I can remember their names after all this time)
Sorry 'bout that. Wrong friggin story. What a morning.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
Not quite sure if this is the contest I think it is, but I watched the championships one year at UCD, and saw the Linux box controlling Newton Labs' team make mulch of the runner-up, students from a Korean technical institute the name of which escapes me, and their DOS box. Granted the algorithm's more important than the OS, but after watching these robots for over an hour it was especially great to walk over and notice the targeting and scheduling displays running on an X desktop. Grizzled-looking guy sitting in front of it said it ran Linux. Whee. :)
Why the heck americans like shit like hockey, baseball and football (not soccer!)? Just a little question... BUT BASEBALL SUCKS HARDDDDD.
Chances are, the real dog would just bite off the AIBO's tail or something like that.
I know, I know.. it's off topic. But it's not WAYY off topic. =c)
- "Hey, aren't you due back at the laboratory to get your BOLTS TIGHTENED??"
I submitted that link last week (mumble)
I wish I could have attended, if only to see the Japanese teams break down in tears when they lost. With AI being as pervasive as it is in Japan (the "focus where you look" cameras, rice cookers with fuzzy logic), one would think they would have had a better showing.