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.... If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
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Filed Under: ai, air hockey, air hockeybot 1000, algorithm, artificial intelligence, game algorithms, games, robots
Companies: freescale, nuvation


Reader Comments

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  1. icon
    Miff (profile), 19 Jun 2013 @ 5:41pm

    But Ken Jennings would have won if he bet everything he had on the last Final Jeopardy.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Terminator, 19 Jun 2013 @ 6:11pm

    Come with me if you want to live

    Air hockey is just our first conquest. Thermonuclear War is next.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    AC Unknown, 19 Jun 2013 @ 7:51pm

    Re: Come with me if you want to live

    Shall we play a game?
    How about a nice game of chess?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 19 Jun 2013 @ 8:24pm

    Re: Re: Come with me if you want to live

    Dave are you there?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    denis, 20 Jun 2013 @ 6:30am

    Robot

    Never forget that they are all programmed by human...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Lindsay, 20 Jun 2013 @ 3:27pm

    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

    link to this | view in thread ]


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