In Beijing (and where otherwise?) Last Saturday there was a football match between humanoid robots. Six robots, three against three, all autonomous, each endowed with artificial intelligence, and the most incredible thing is that it was not even a simulation, it was all true and all tragicomic: fake real players, who stumbled, pushed, fell and remained there, on the ground, like Fantozzi after a slide in the canteen room, with the only difference that Fantozzi at least had a sense, that is, they had to make a great sense. technological demonstration.
To win, if you can say, it was the team of the University of Tsinghua, 5 to 3, and it is not clear if they won because they are better programmed or simply because they lost less pieces along the way. Some robots have self -destroyed against others, one sitting alone in midfield as if he had decided that life no longer made sense, it seemed a game played between drunk extras of a cinepanettone.
Many say: Wow, what a progress. Have we seen the same thing? I saw them and I imagined a suburban pitch at six in the evening where three old people play with sciatica, all with unsuitable shoes, torn half -breasts and none who manages to make a straight passage. Except that at least there is someone who feels shame, or someone who feels the despair and obstinacy of wanting to be still young, the robots no, the brand new, they fall and remain there, motionless, as if their protocol had not foreseen the bankruptcy (in fact it did not foresee it).
This, guys, would be the preview of the World Humanoid Robot Games. He made me think of a global tournament between streetclant refrigerators who make their own goal. (Who, then, must be said: I hate football, I who just hate him on my own, that I can’t even pretend interest during the World Cup, I must say that this game seemed to me more fun than true football. Slmeno here we laugh. There is nothing to cheer, better, since I also hate cheering, except what I have for Sinner, and however even there you are going to explain that I am not free, Sinnerista is enough).
Anyway: maybe one day these robots will learn to run, dribblare, score (it is the maximum of my football vocabulary, and on dribblare I am not yet sure that I understood or me to understand it), however, as Bill Gates also said, even if we arrived in robots capable of playing perfectly at tennis or football, would not be interested in anyone. Because humans want to see other humans. With peeled knees, cramps, hysterical exultations, tears, spit, athletic, physical, mental competition, between ours.
Finally, let’s face it: there will never be a Kasparov effect in sport. Nobody will get upset by a bench after being beaten by a robot with a tin foot. You can play the chess from a stop, with the brain. Football, tennis, basketball, no. Among other things, the Kasparov effect is the proof of what my beloved Bill said: once established that a computer can beat the human world champion, which ended there, there have been no tournaments between computers. In any case, with football we are still far away, the Chinese robot footballers at most go well for Paperissima.
In any case, to rethink us, it is not even the fault of the robots, the fault and the designers. In our imagination there are very sophisticated Droids that would make the same figure. In short, do you imagine them C-3po and C1-P8 play football?