Would humans still have a chance in these events from the first two days of this year’s World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing? Would you? Make your predictions before you watch!
Events:
100m race
400m race
Standing high jump
Running long jump
Soccer
1,500m race
Kickboxing
Tai chi
Table tennis
Regular tennis
Results:
In the 100-meter, you stand no chance. The winner ran it in 9.39 seconds vs. Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58s.
It’s a similar story with the 400-meter. (Here’s a wider angle.) The winner finished in 39.7 seconds, beating Wayde van Niekerk’s world record of 43.03.
You no doubt notice the trend here in the racing events. The winner of the 1,500-meter clocked a time more than a minute faster than the human world record.
You won’t make it in the standing high jump, either, with a robot reaching 2.88m vs. the best human jump of 2.45m, but this seems a little unfair because the rules seem to have permitted these particular bots to have inhumanly long legs; they almost seem to hang too long in the air, like something from a Hong Kong martial arts film.
I couldn’t find the best distance achieved by the robots in the running long jump, but here’s a different angle on a jump that was said to be record-breaking. I don’t know if this beats the best humans, but it’s certainly more than I could do.
I have better news for you in soccer, where I’m confident that you would absolutely mop the floor with the bots, regardless of your skill. The machines are getting there, though. Given another year or two, who knows?
Hazards notwithstanding, I think you could also more than hold your own in kickboxing, where the bots mostly seem to be flailing in the air and occasionally kicking themselves over. But boy do they get right back up again.
Tai chi is an event where I think it would actually depend on your skill. For now, the demonstrations are kind of hypnotic to watch, but they stumble a bit and fail to stick the landing.
If you have literally zero table tennis skill you might lose to the only humanoid I saw attempting a volley in what turned out to be a very one-sided affair. With any skill at all, I think you would crush it.
The regular tennis on display looked like more of a proof of concept, but the proof is there. Could you keep a friendly volley going for 136 hits? Probably not without some practice. No competitive skill on display here, though.
These aren’t the only events. The Games, after all, are more of a trade show for Chinese robotics companies, and their customers are more interested in robots that can do commercially valuable tasks. But either nobody is training cameras on the robots serving beverages and laying bricks or those events haven’t happened yet.
You probably inferred from the kickboxing that some events still involve a degree of remote control. But this year, more events than ever require full autonomy, including soccer and most of the races. For the useful scenario tasks, autonomy is still optional, but a fully autonomous performance rewards double the points.
If you run into random clips from the Games, you may be confused that sometimes the robots seem to have very different proportions. There are, in fact, three different size categories: kid, teen, and adult. The kid-sized soccer produced the Games’ current record for a long-range goal, but the keeper appeared to be out of position.
The Games run through the 26th.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.