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This is great news. It seemed like BattleBots was just a couple years too early for its time. With the wide availability of Lego NXT, Arduino, and an overall "h

This is great news. It seemed like BattleBots was just a couple years too early for its time. With the wide availability of Lego NXT, Arduino, and an overall "hardware hacking" ethos permeating tech culture this could catch on in a much bigger way. Best of luck to them!

jerf 18y ago
Battlebots didn't end because it was ahead of its time. In my opinion, Battlebots ended because the ruleset created an optimal robot ("spin as much of your mass as possible as fast as possible and hit the other robot before they do the same") and it became boring to watch the two resulting fights: "Optimal robot utterly destroys non-optimal robot in one blow" and "two optimal robots charge directly at each other and in one blow the match is resolved". Note the "one blow" in both descriptions... which of course is not to say it was "one blow" in literally every fight, but it often was. If they're going to succeed, they're going to have to tune the rules better, but that causes its own problems as people start to feel Battlebots is stacking the deck against effective robots... which is in fact exactly what they are doing, after all. Maybe if they are open about what they are doing and tune the rules carefully after each competition, they can keep the fun factor up, but no matter how you slice it, they walk a delicate line between actually effective robots and interesting-to-watch robots. I don't know that there have been any terribly interesting technological advances that would change the equation about whether Battlebots is "ahead of its time". Under the scenario in question, putting any sort of clever logic on board of any kind (autonomous or human-assisted) is just adding a complicated part that will die on the first blow, so where a lot of the advances have occurred isn't really relevant to Battlebots.
- replicatorblog 18y ago
  Jerf, You bring up good points. I think you are certainly correct that for it to be more than a novelty this time they will need to have different rule sets that create more interesting matchups. When I was reading the rules of this new version it was basically "No holds barred" it would be cool to see a robot that sprayed acid or could napalm a competitors "sledgebot". To your point about a lack of technological advancement, there may not have been a major tech breakthrough, but I think the buzz around Arduino and related projects certainly packed the tech in a way that opened up hardware hacking to a much wider audience. There is a tech workshop in Boston called Willoughby and Baltic that is teaching artists to program with Arduino. I think a rule change coupled with a more diverse group of participants could do a lot for this nascent "sport".
- queensnake 18y ago
  Yeah I'd like to see them climb in sophistication, be autonomous too; maybe make them find each other on a lumpy battlefield, via vision or something. CPU power has gotten much cheaper since the last time they were current. It was just hardware. You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware. It risks not being as popular but, /simulated/ robots could have unlimited hardware and computation power. If you got interesting behaviors like stalking, maybe decoying, whatever. You could at least render the fight beautifully, to make up partially for the lack of it being real. The sophistication of the hardware would be unlimited, you could have one roll up in a ball or otherwise change shape. And, that would be /some/ platform for botmaking. I think the physics models are powerful enough to model damage. Dayam, someone should do this.
  - jerf 18y ago
    "You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware." To be honest, I don't really care. They need to embrace the fact that it's a show, an artificial competition where rule #1 is "the fights must be interesting to human beings" and #2 is "the fight must be fair in the sense that everybody knew this year's rules at the same time and everybody is working under the same rules". How they get there is up to them. I think to fit into their original niche, they need to be real, physical robots for most people to care, and unfortunately given the nature of the competition it seems unlikely that autonomous logic is going to play a big role. Although one thought did occur to me that I feel stupid for not realizing before. I am very skeptical of the ability of complicated circuitry to survive on the robot itself, but of course there's no reason not to put the logic up there with the human, getting remote sensor data and issuing commands. Duh! Now we're cooking with fire. Full autonomy still seems like asking for trouble but I often thought some computer-aided targeting assistance could have been helpful.

jerf 18y ago

Battlebots didn't end because it was ahead of its time. In my opinion, Battlebots ended because the ruleset created an optimal robot ("spin as much of your mass as possible as fast as possible and hit the other robot before they do the same") and it became boring to watch the two resulting fights: "Optimal robot utterly destroys non-optimal robot in one blow" and "two optimal robots charge directly at each other and in one blow the match is resolved". Note the "one blow" in both descriptions... which of course is not to say it was "one blow" in literally every fight, but it often was. If they're going to succeed, they're going to have to tune the rules better, but that causes its own problems as people start to feel Battlebots is stacking the deck against effective robots... which is in fact exactly what they are doing, after all. Maybe if they are open about what they are doing and tune the rules carefully after each competition, they can keep the fun factor up, but no matter how you slice it, they walk a delicate line between actually effective robots and interesting-to-watch robots. I don't know that there have been any terribly interesting technological advances that would change the equation about whether Battlebots is "ahead of its time". Under the scenario in question, putting any sort of clever logic on board of any kind (autonomous or human-assisted) is just adding a complicated part that will die on the first blow, so where a lot of the advances have occurred isn't really relevant to Battlebots.

replicatorblog 18y ago
Jerf, You bring up good points. I think you are certainly correct that for it to be more than a novelty this time they will need to have different rule sets that create more interesting matchups. When I was reading the rules of this new version it was basically "No holds barred" it would be cool to see a robot that sprayed acid or could napalm a competitors "sledgebot". To your point about a lack of technological advancement, there may not have been a major tech breakthrough, but I think the buzz around Arduino and related projects certainly packed the tech in a way that opened up hardware hacking to a much wider audience. There is a tech workshop in Boston called Willoughby and Baltic that is teaching artists to program with Arduino. I think a rule change coupled with a more diverse group of participants could do a lot for this nascent "sport".
queensnake 18y ago
Yeah I'd like to see them climb in sophistication, be autonomous too; maybe make them find each other on a lumpy battlefield, via vision or something. CPU power has gotten much cheaper since the last time they were current. It was just hardware. You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware. It risks not being as popular but, /simulated/ robots could have unlimited hardware and computation power. If you got interesting behaviors like stalking, maybe decoying, whatever. You could at least render the fight beautifully, to make up partially for the lack of it being real. The sophistication of the hardware would be unlimited, you could have one roll up in a ball or otherwise change shape. And, that would be /some/ platform for botmaking. I think the physics models are powerful enough to model damage. Dayam, someone should do this.
- jerf 18y ago
  "You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware." To be honest, I don't really care. They need to embrace the fact that it's a show, an artificial competition where rule #1 is "the fights must be interesting to human beings" and #2 is "the fight must be fair in the sense that everybody knew this year's rules at the same time and everybody is working under the same rules". How they get there is up to them. I think to fit into their original niche, they need to be real, physical robots for most people to care, and unfortunately given the nature of the competition it seems unlikely that autonomous logic is going to play a big role. Although one thought did occur to me that I feel stupid for not realizing before. I am very skeptical of the ability of complicated circuitry to survive on the robot itself, but of course there's no reason not to put the logic up there with the human, getting remote sensor data and issuing commands. Duh! Now we're cooking with fire. Full autonomy still seems like asking for trouble but I often thought some computer-aided targeting assistance could have been helpful.