Humans Beat Machines in SodaRace For Now

Posted 1 Dec 2003 at 04:55 UTC by The Swirling Brain

Cnet says that Humans beat AI in robot wars. It's not really a war per se, but rather it's an online competition called the SodaRace which pits humans against virtual robots. It seems that Canadian humans won the first round by creating a machine using trial and error. It may not be a fair test of man vs machine, but interesting nevertheless. If you would like, you can also create and play around with your own soda robots using the sodaconstructor to test your intelligence abilities. You may have seen the sodaconstructor before, but it's the competition of human vs. ai that makes it very interesting. It may be hard to overcome human craftyness but like recent chess matches demonstrate, it may instead be hard to beat the computer. It runs on Java and it's cool. Check it out.

Recipes for solar sodapoppers perhaps?, posted 3 Dec 2003 at 07:22 UTC by Frank McNeill » (Apprentice)

Some of the Soda constructs look like virtual models for real bots that could be driven by piezoelectric "twisters" or "benders" because of the leg motion amplification between the upper frames that have very slight motions and the ends of legs that have larger excursions adequate for rap

As I was about to say, posted 3 Dec 2003 at 07:29 UTC by Frank McNeill » (Apprentice)

adequate for rapid scuttling across flat surfaces.
I DO NOT LIKE THE PROCEDURE FOR REPLIES, IT NEEDS SOME WAY TO BACK UP FOR CORRECTIONS AND HAS A TENDENCY TO POST STUFF WHILE I AM STILL TYPING.
Diary entries can be audited and corrected, so why couldn't these features be used for replies as well?

patches accepted, posted 3 Dec 2003 at 16:47 UTC by steve » (Master)

robots.net is based on mod_virgule, which is Free Software / Open Source Software. If there are features you'd like to add, patches will very likely be accepted. That's the beauty of Open Source, you don't have to beg Bill Gates to fix things, you can just do it yourself anytime you want. Quite a lot of the current functionality is from patches users have submitted. Here are a few links to get you started:
Advogato mod_virgule project page - this page has some links and info about the original source as used to run the Advogato programmer's site.
My mod_virgule fork - this is a fork of the original code with a lot of additional features I've added (some that I've written, some patches others have submitted). Many of the patches from our fork have made their way back into the original codebase as well.
Adam Shand's mod_virgule Wiki - this is a Wiki site that has a lot of useful general info about mod_virgule including links to the developer mailing lists and cvs repositories.
Incidently, there is a preview button which allows you to preview your post and make corrections as needed prior to posting.