The human body is a miracle, and if you don’t agree I’ll beat you senseless in the street until you do. So it’s easy to take for granted how the human brain can balance the body to make it stand erect, or how it subconsciously braces itself for impact during a fall. Do you have involuntary reflexes, robot? Didn’t think so. From New Scientist:

Javier Ruiz-del-Solar of the University of Chile in Santiago and his team are training two teams of soccerbots for the annual world RoboCup. The aim of the RoboCup project is to have a robotic team in place by 2050 that can beat the best human side – an impossible goal unless soccerbots can learn to fall over without damaging themselves.

I don’t believe this; they’re teaching robots how to take dives. What kind of hotel is this? After they’ve mastered the physics of the fall, the next step will be to program robots to actually watch soccer without flipping into hibernation from the boredom. Eh, I actually like some soccer. But robots these days, all they wanna do is fiddle with their iPhones and watch MMA. They can do whatever they please as long as they stay off my lawn.