August 2005

Julian Richards

In the future, when the world is run by thinking machines, May 11th may well be a public holiday. It was on that day in 1997 that IBM computer Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov and machines overtook humans as the preeminent chess playing entities on the planet. Chess players everywhere were stunned. Computer scientists were overjoyed. Other, more socially adjusted people simply yawned. But this was a milestone event in the relationship between Man and Machine. Humanity had gotten its first real intellectual ego-bruising. And the ascendant world of robotic artificial intelligence was just getting started. They had their sights set on a bigger, greener target: The Soccer Pitch.
In the year 2050 a team of autonomous humanoid robots will beat the World Cup champions in a game of soccer. This isn’t the tagline from some Pixar film. It’s the stated objective of the Robocup Initiative, an annual robotics convention that was hosted by Osaka in July 2005.

This fanciful endeavor began when a bunch of pocket-protector-wearing people got together and decided that chess wasn’t a good enough benchmark for measuring artificial intelligence. This makes sense, really. Chess is all about math. A machine capable of 200 million calculations a second may be able to beat a chess grandmaster, but let’s see it negotiate a crowded sidewalk, or successfully apply for a Japanese visa extension. The most primitive calculator can multiply and divide better than I can, but at least I know 10 divided by 3 times 3 is 10, not 9.99999 repeating. Intelligence is clearly about more than number crunching. So artificial intelligence and robotics experts, eager to prove robots can hack it in the real world, branched out from the static, turn based world of chess to the dynamic, real time world of soccer. An ambitious new goal was adopted: By the year 2050, (some roboticist no doubt announced dramatically as he straightened his lab coat and adjusted his glasses,) a robotic soccer team will beat a human one. The World Cup champions no less. To this end yearly soccer tournaments are held, pitting various wheeled, four-legged, and humanoid robots against each other. The humanoid robots, in particular, are startlingly realistic. They aren’t remote controlled. They are programmed to look for the ball, walk up to it, dribble it and kick it towards the opposing goal. When they fall, they get up as humans do, pushing off with one arm and balancing with the other, then getting on with the game. It’s not exactly “thinking”, but it’s closer than you’d expect.

Still, the World Cup champions of 2050 don’t have to start worrying just yet. For one thing, most of the robots are less than a meter tall. For another, they still look more like wind-up toys than soccer players. As they lurch about, bump into each other and topple over, you can’t help but think the whole project is bit of a cockamamie use of time and resources. We already have people that play soccer. I like playing soccer. If you’re going to build a robot, make it do something necessary yet tedious, like housework. But as frivolous as a soccer playing robot may be, it gets trumped by the robots that dance around in kimonos, or the microscopic hand that plays rock-paper-scissors. Contraptions like these made Robocup 2005 feel more like a kind of high tech Disneyland than an “international research and education initiative”.
But for all the whimsical nonsense, there was some very practical technology on display as well. Like the giant robotic arm that increased your strength tenfold, allowing you to pick up a park bench with one hand. Well, that’s more “supervillainesque” than practical, but there was a robotic spoon that allows quadriplegics to eat by themselves, and robots that rescue people from disaster zones. Those are pretty good ideas.

Apparently, robots are playing more and more important roles in all walks of life. The US military uses robots extensively. They want
one third of their vehicles to be unmanned by 2013. In June, a robot successfully assisted during a tumor removal surgery in a New York hospital. And the South Korean government’s creepily named “Ubiquitous Robotic Companion” project aims to introduce artificially intelligent robots into homes and public offices as early as October.
In Japan, big name companies like Sony and Toyota are investing heavily in robotics. If you count “humanoid robots” as a demographic, they rank second only to the elderly in terms of population growth. There are already robots that dance, run and play musical instruments, but entertainment is only the tip of the iceberg. As crime rates rise, security robots that keep your home
safe are beginning to hit the market. “Partner” robots that take care of the very young and very old are also beginning to appear. And as the population ages and the number of working-age employees shrinks, a bipedal robot workforce is expected to fill the void.
So, is the day robots baby-sit our kids, populate our factories, slack off in our public offices, run our military, prescribe our medication, and beat our best soccer team a mere half century away? I doubt it. But then again, a lot can happen in 50 years. We went from the Wright brothers to the moon in 50 years. Who would have predicted that? And in 1947, no one imagined a machine would
ever beat a human at chess.

Posted on August 2005 in the following categories: Events