DailyDirt: Air Hockey Robots
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
There is a decreasing number of games that humans can play against computers and still win. Most of us would lose at chess. If Ken Jennings can’t win Jeopardy! against a computer, the rest of us likely have limited chances. People probably shouldn’t play poker with real money against AI. But we can still have some fun playing, right? Robots can’t beat us at games like tennis and soccer (yet), but they’re getting pretty good at air hockey, so we better watch out….
- Japanese researchers have created a formidable air hockey robot that can adjust its strategy after observing its human opponents. By creating a bot that adapts to its opponents, it makes the game more entertaining for humans. [url]
- In 2008, Nuvation built an air hockey robot in less than 10 weeks. The bot is only good at defense (really really good), so it doesn’t try to win as much as it just never loses (and humans give up). [url]
- The Air Hockeybot 1000 at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh is a permanent robotics exhibition featuring the Nuvation robot. Anyone can play against this bot, but it’s hard to beat a 32-bit computer (the 8-bit version is an easier opponent). [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: ai, air hockey, air hockeybot 1000, algorithm, artificial intelligence, game algorithms, games, robots
Companies: freescale, nuvation
Comments on “DailyDirt: Air Hockey Robots”
But Ken Jennings would have won if he bet everything he had on the last Final Jeopardy.
Come with me if you want to live
Air hockey is just our first conquest. Thermonuclear War is next.
Re: Come with me if you want to live
Shall we play a game?
How about a nice game of chess?
Re: Re: Come with me if you want to live
Dave are you there?
Robot
Never forget that they are all programmed by human…
Nuvation's Air Hockey Robot
Interesting fact about Nuvation’s air hockey bot: when they first debuted the bot at the Freescale technology forum, everyone observed that women were much better at beating it than men were. Why?
The initial algorithm didn’t do a very good job of calculating the effect of the spin of the puck. Men hit the puck harder, and when the puck is traveling really quickly the effect of the spin is negligible. When you slow the puck down just a bit, the spin changes the direction a lot more, and the robot had trouble compensating!
Read a recap of the design story on Nuvation’s blog