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World Championships in Robot Soccer

Posted by Roblimo on from the finally-a-sport-your-computer-can-love dept.

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."

1 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Benefits to AI research dubious at best by Sanity · · Score: 3
    During my degree in Artificial Intelligence we participated in a similar Lego based game, this time robot-rugby. We were given kits (not Mindstorms, but an in-house concoction) and told to build robots that played this game. During the course of the project my team and I became somewhat disillusioned with the whole thing, and while some came up with hopelessly elaborate software, we made our robot bumble about randomly, grasping the ball if detected. While we didn't win, we did come second in our section.

    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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