DailyDirt: Playing Games With Robots

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Robots have mastered games like air hockey, and they're about to dominate other casual table top games. It's getting to the point that humans won't be able to play any games that computers aren't better at. Here are just a few other bots that might ruin your amateur winning streak (someday).

• German table tennis champion Timo Boll will play against an industrial robot arm made by Kuka. The match is scheduled for this March 11th, and the teaser trailer for the event makes the single-armed robot look like a formidable opponent. [url]
• Basement entertainment will never be the same because robots are learning how to play foosball, too. These robots can shoot a ball at speeds of 6 meters per second, enough to whizz by a casual foosball player, and pretty soon these bots will consistently beat humans. [url]
• Two-armed robots are ready to play billiards and have already managed to nail easy shots about 80% of the time. This humanoid robot plays pool similarly to a human, judging the difficulty of shots in order to plan a sequence of higher probability shots. [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, artificial intelligence, billiards, foosball, game algorithms, games, ping pong, pool, robots, table tennis, timo boll