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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

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

"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.