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