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."

2050

[rbarreira]

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...

power

[roman_mir]

Actually I don't doubt that from point of view of mechanics and programming robots that beat humans in all kinds of sport can be built, but will these robots have power cables running to them? Or will the robot team have to replace the batteries on each robot every 10 minutes, that is what I would like to know. How will these robots be powered? For the longest time it has been a tradition in sci-fi stories to have autonomous robots that don't need to recharge every 10 minutes, it is assumed that in the future the problem of battery capacity is somehow resolved. Some robots use built in fission plants, some use fusion plants, some use batteries of unexplained nature, but they can run for days or even years without recharging. If we could actually do something like that, then the life on this planet could become interesting again.

The question still stands

[giorgiofr]

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

Re:Silly northamericans.

[roman_mir]

Just thought of something. The robots that play this game, are they playing with feet or with hands? Can we even apply those terms to robots' body parts? They are definitely playing with lower appendages, maybe they are lower manipulators? So maybe robots are playing ManipulatorBall or Manipuball. Eewww, sounds dirty.

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[RsG]

Let me guess, you are now typing with one hand?

He is, but that has nothing to do with robotics. :-P

On a more serious note, given that the only part of the body that's really needed for an otherwise mechanical entity to be considered a "human" cyborg is the brain, who says that robots will have the advantage?

I'd say a 800 pound cybernetic football player with a metal body and a human brain (augmented by microchips) would have an advantage over the same metal body governed by a computer. After all, computers can't improvise as well, and I suspect that football is simple enough that the extra processing power of a computer isn't needed.

Of course, that's assuming that we can't make an AI that is equal to a human mind in that regard, but I'd actually think that such an AI would be harder to develop than the cybernetics involved in creating a robotic body with a human brain. After all, a robot physically capable of playing football would probably be possible with modern technology, and I'd imagine that we'll have the technology to turn nervous signals into computer data before we have the technology to make a software program think like a human.

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[roman_mir]

well, if you don't have a limit on the poundage (excuse me, weight,) then the robots can win by default by dropping a trillion ton anvil on the opponent's goal.

But seriously, will we also allow instant communications and radio-coordination between players on the field? This can make all the difference. Of-course if the cyborgs can also do this then the outcome is not certain.

However if we also don't bother too much with the definition of a player, then the robot team can just roll out a cannon, load the ball into the barrel and shoot straight into the opponent's goal.

Re:Wrong. StrongAI will still have the advantage

[vertinox]

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.

Actually, you are falling into the fallacy (as Ed at the Singularity institue calls it) anthromorphic assumtion. We assume that we as humans will be the same now as we are then and we assume that robots and humans have the same limitations today.

Lets say in 2050 we have a robot that can rip a regular humans arms of. Chances are that will be a given.

But whats the difference between a robot and a robot with a human brain inside of it that can rip a normal humans arms off? (think Ghost in the Shell)

Well besides the life support system and neural interface, changes are the robot and the cyborg are on equal footing. Heck... You could not even get rid of the human body, but have a neural interface to the humans mind while he sits in a room somewhere and controls the robot remotley.

But... The robot or should we say... AI (if they pull it off) will that the advantage over the human speed and tactical wise.

Lets say the goalie human cyborg being on equal strength of the robot can only guess and predict X amount of moves in X amount of seconds in determine where and where the robot is going to optimally kick the ball (and from which direction). If his mind is still organic without enhancements, he'll have to think at the speed of his synapses (1 to 120 meters per second) even with an electronic interface to robotic eyes or radar or whatever cyborg soccer players use to see in 2050. Then he has to use those neurons to fire off and communicate with his robot body.

The robot, having the disctinct advantage of being electronic through and through can use his computing power at the speed of electrons running from his eyes to his CPU and to his arms (which is near speed of light) and has the speed. Not only that the average human mind can not simply make more than 5 guess on the next best move. (Kasaprov the chess champion can do something like 12 next best moves).

So while the human goalie is trying to guess what the AI is going to do, the AI has already formulated all possible moves and has found the move he can make that will have the highest percentage of scoring a goal. Not only that he communicated this wirelessly to his robotic teammates and they are doing moves together in real time. That would be really hard for humans to do.

However, a cyborg human with AI assistants will have a better chance of finding the next best move.

Now of course you may wonder, how do we interface a human with a machine in the first place? We are doing it today small scale and the human body is fragile, but what is to say that in 45 years that they have figured out safe ways to interface the human mind to a machine and can even build life support systems that no longer needs the human body to keep a brain alive.

We have those kind of life support systems today and could make a complete "brain in a jar" if we really wanted, but it wouldn't be fun for the brain since we don't have thing to interface for communication.

Otherwise think of it like this... Today is 1906.

If we compare all the changes to life that happend from 1906 to 1946... We heavier than air flight, atomic bombs, mass production, radar, trasnatlantic flight and rockets. Who is to say that by 2050 we are going to have the limitations of what we have now when we are dealing with robotics and human interfaces.

Re:Robots will still have the advantage

[RsG]

True, but all that assumes that whatever sport the robots are playing has no rules.

If we said today that the only requirement for playing pro sports was that the player be human, then what would stop the athletes from doping themselves to the gils before play? I would imagine that if there was a "cyborg league", there'd be some sort of rule set for what equipment is allowable on the player, equivalent to the rules we have now about steroid use.

Re:power

[YA_Python_dev]

I was in a team that built a humanoid robot for the robocup a few years ago.
Yes those robot have all the batteries on board and they have a very short duration: the absolute maximum was more or less 20 minutes, but some robots had batteries that lasted less than 60 seconds (the duration required for a single kick: the competitions in the humanoid league are pretty simple for now ;-)).

MegaHAL is great

[Nurgled]

A bunch of friends and I used to run a bunch of MegaHAL bots on an IRC network. A couple of them ran for several years. We let them talk to one another on channels sometimes, with appropriate rate-limiting. After a while the longer-running ones started to seem more and more insane as their databases grew larger and larger. Eventually one of them exploded and corrupted its database somehow; we couldn't be bothered to fix it, but it was a fun experiment while it lasted.