10th Annual RoboCup

Aryabhata writes "As soccer fever continues the 10th RoboCup also got to a start. 400 teams fight it out in 11 different leagues including onces designed for humanoid to four legged robots. "The organizers of the tournament hope that in 2050 the winners of the RoboCup will be able to beat the human World Cup champions".
Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas. The championships is followed by a 2 day conference where the teams can dissect their play and work."

Re:2050

[Alsn]

You wont be playing in the world cup as a footballer if youre a dumb, vain one. Regardless of what the average is the "best" will always be the smarter/stronger ones.

Robots will still have the advantage

[technoextreme]

In 2050, the question "Is a team of robots capable of beating a team of humans in football?" will be irrelevant (or at least very different from what it is now). What is a human? Do "cyborg-like" modifications to one's body allow him to be considered human? Etc etc...

Well think of it logically. With robotics there is no limit to how powerful you can make their sensors and motors without causing harm to anything. It's just a matter of technology. WIth humans you can't just start attaching parts in a slapdash manner. That arm which can lift a couple thousand pounds will rip the socket and pretty much kill you if you use it to the potential. Robots don't have that problem. PS. If you can guess where I learned this Ill give you a cookie.

2050? Yeah, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe AI will advance to the point that a robotic team would win (more easily if they 'share thoughts'), but who foresees that in 40 years there will be robotic machines fast, light and flexible enough to play with humans? Soccer is a contact sport (maybe not as much as rugby, I know). Would you play against a plastics/metal body? Would any country or soccer club risk their players? Some of these guys will be worth more than the robots.

As a goal to encourage scientific progress it may be a good idea. As a practical matter, I don't think it is.

Games as an AI research platform.

[Black Parrot]

> Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas.

FYI, though RoboCup has been around for a long time, the past few years have seen a sudden surge of interest in the use of games as a platform for AI research. In addition to the now vast literature on RoboCup there are several new conferences dedicated to AI and games, usually covering non-RoboCup topics. Grep the net for Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG), and the Special Session on Games at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). I've seen some of the proceedings on line, and you can find some pretty interesting papers about applications, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Yeah, right

[Clovert Agent]

"RoboCup 2006 is the first step towards a vision," said Minoru Asada, president of the RoboCup Federation.

"This vision includes the development of a humanoid robot team of eleven players, which can win against a human soccer world champion team."

Even granting the somewhat unlikely prospect of a robot team that can match the skill and tactical experience of a human side, I can't see them overcoming the obvious safety problems.

Call me when Minoru Asada is willing to demo what it's like to be slide-tackled by a robot, and I'll reconsider.

Re: Games as an AI research platform.

[Black Parrot]

> I talked with several teams and I was quite surprised when I saw how primitive the their programs were. They basically had thousand nested "if" statements. No neural nets or anything remotely advanced. [...] The Robocup competition I saw there didn't require any special AI or engineering skills from team members at all.

Kind of like the "beat Kasparov" approach to chess-playing AI. When competition is involved, people resort to hardware and hacks. That says a lot about the state of AI after ~50 years of research!

Re:power

[roman_mir]

But a human cannot push 3 tons of steel at a constant speed of 150km/h for hours and hours and in fact for as long, as there is fuel.

Sure, living organisms are very efficient at what they do, but we are not talking about living organisms.

Calculating chemical power requirements for living cells and organisms that comprise of living cells is not that different from calculating power requirements for a 100W lightbulb. Sure, living organisms are efficient in using chemical energy, but these chemicals in themselves are not the best storage mechanism for machines, that need lots of power instantly. That's why excavators burn petrol byproducts for power and not potato chips.

By the way a car for example can in principle use solar power directly, but a human cannot. A human has to wait for a plant to use the solar power and then a human can eat the plant. This is an inderect way to retrieve power and it is not the most efficient way.

Re:2050

[mustafap]

I wonder what people 45 years ago would have made of the technology we use today? Why shouldn't technology 45 years in the future surprise us as much?

Re:The question still stands

[Kjella]

Can a working human mind ultimately be reduced to a complicated algorithm? Will we be able to emulate it, given the necessary computing power?

I think a more interesting question would be what would happen if we assume the existance of such a working brain. Our experience has been that when we can make it work, a computer is damn fast and damn precise at it. A computer can never die, never forget, be an expert at almost everything. Imagine a computer that could comprehend and set in system all the information in the Library of Congress. That could read up and be a doctorate in every subject. That could learn all languages of the world.

It could very well skip several steps ahead of man simply by being able to see all of it at once. It would not only be an expert in the field, it'd also be an expert coder - that can create and run simulations and test scenarios at speeds we only can dream of. It can corrolate data and try to find logical explainations for them - to find new causations we haven't seen yet. Basicly the scientic method on steroids.

I have read a few books in my life, I have a Master's degree and I speak three languages. But when it comes down to it, I have only a microscopic part of all human knowledge. Even the true geniuses may be extremely impressive, but they too operate within their own little niche. It's simply a limitation of being human.

Another thing that would be very interesting would be ethics and morality - I doubt you will be able to code in anything like that into a thinking brain. In order to function it will have to be create it by itself to apply to the situation.Will it evolve one? Is it natural? Will it go Skynet on us?

An even stranger question is the goal - to what end would a computer brain exist? To reproduce? That's a rather stupid concept for a computer, and only exists in biological life because producing offspring is the only way to survive. Could it, like human-ethics try to do, reason itself to a purpose? Does it need a purpose? Other creatures have instincts but how could a computer have that?

In practise I think we're ages away from creating a functioning AI. But I think all it takes is that magic spark, the creativity and the ability to evolve. From there it'll take itself to where it needs to go. Simulating behavior, even very complex behaviour is good for creating simulated intelligence. But I don't think it brings us much closer to a truly intelligent computer.

Re:For the 10000th time,

[MamiyaOtaru]

Someone should inform the Socceroos.