Australia must be a very lonely place, seeing as structural engineer Kris Tressider decided to build a real robot to fight. Jeez, Kris. I would think wearing a pink shirt into a bar in rural Tasmania would get you all the fights you’d be looking for.

But this is great, aside from the fact that the robot doesn’t have any legs or can’t hit only white people with money. Ever notice how none of these people doing great things with robotics are ever Americans? Oh, we had a fridge that shoots beer out of a cannon. Great. Call me when that fridge is able to drive me back to the bar.

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If you missed out on the man-versus-machine match on “Jeopardy!” earlier this week, we humans basically got our asses kicked. Watson, the IBM supercomputer designed for the two-game match, won with $77,147. Former “Jeopardy!” champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter finished with $24,000 and $21,600, respectively.

Everyone involved seemed to recognize this as a historic event in computing, and if you haven’t read Jennings’s chat on the Washington Post website from Tuesday or his piece on Slate yesterday, you’d be entertained by both. A sampling from the former:

Q: I was suprised that you only got through the first round. I found too much of the first night devoted to IBM, like a long commercial. What is the format of the next two nights?

A: The contest is two games stretched out over three nights: another half game tomorrow, with the final game Wednesday. In addition to giving IBM a nice infomercial spot (if you buy a Watson 1.0 license for home use, you also get a Watson mouse pad and some steak knives!) the documentary spots help explain how the contest came together, why this truly represents an AI breakthrough, and so forth.

It reminds me of the “human interest” stuff that always clogs up Olympic footage. Revealed tonight: Watson hopes to win these games for its adorable little sister, who has leukemia!

Other computer conquests of humans in games include Deep Blue’s controversial chess win against Garry Kasparov in 1997 and the CPU opponent against me every time I play Madden. How does that damn game ALWAYS come up with 2 touchdowns in the last 1:15? Total bologna.

Watch Double and Final Jeopardy! of Game Two after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

For those of you who don't read the FanHaus, you may be unfamiliar with the work of Miss Gossip.  She creates brilliant and ridiculous MS Paint drawings or puts together other odd images for all of her posts — the end result makes her one of the few instantly recognizable bloggers on the AOL uber-blog's otherwise visually sterile site.

This weekend Miss Gossip wrote "The Story of Grant Hill," in which she inexplicably and hilariously paired up photos of Hill and Knut the polar bear.  Why?  I don't know, but it was awesome.  In Gossip's version of Hill's history, the Duke alum "was born in 1972 in Dallas, Texas. His mother abandoned him at birth and he was raised in Berlin by a kind German zookeeper. Against all odds, the adorable Hill flourished under the difficult conditions…"  (The link in the quote is hers, obviously.)

The AOL commenters… oh, just read it for yourself:

- I THOUGHT GRANT HILL WAS THE SON OF NFL STAR CALVIN HILL. IS THAT TRUE? IF CALVIN HILL WAS DADD TO GRANT WHY DIDNT HE RAISE HIM? EITHER WAY I HAVE ALWAYS ADMIRED GRANT HILL. AFTER READING THIS STORY I EVEN ADMIRE GRANT HILL EVEN MORE.

- What is the relationship between Hill and the bear?

- I think the person who wrote this artcle needs to do a little research in the form of finding out who Hill's parents are. His mother was roomates with Hillary Clinton in college and his father WAS Calvin Hill if I remember right was a pro bowler. Hill grew up with all the financial advantages and that is part of the reason he went to private high school and Duke University. Do some research next time!!

- What is the purpose of this story? Is it suppose to be funny? If it is then whoever wrote it is just silly, why write a story like this? some people are going to believe this. Grant Hill was not abandoned as a child dont believe this story.

My head hurts.