Robots continue to take over the world

EETimes reports: [edited]

An upgraded robot designed by General Electric Fanuc (GEF) and programmed by Nuvation Research Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) can beat most human air hockey players, its developers claim.

So far, the robot has defeated every human opponent running in 32-bit mode, averaging three times as many goals as human players. The algorithm's success resulted from revising its strategy whenever a goal was scored against it. Some revisions were refinements of strategies, but others were outright fixes to bugs in tactics.

"Good players would 'sucker' the robot into overextending, then slip a goal in behind the arm while it was recalculating. We fixed that by automatically retracting at the end of each move," Worry said.

As was the case when the Polaris AI system beat humans at poker and IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Gary Kasparov at chess, expert players are now challenging the GEF robot to an official tournament. A challenge has yet to be scheduled.
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