China managed to make one of the coolest sounding premises staggeringly nerdy as the country pits humanoid robots against humans in a half marathon run. According to The Guardian, this meat vs. machine mini marathon was held at Yizhuang in Beijing on Saturday, where 21 robots joined the thousands of fleshy fitness fanatics in competition.
The real downside to this news is the robots didn't win, or even come close. In our hubris these robots were kept to humanoid design, which includes human style bi-pedal movement. Running is one of those things that seems particularly difficult to teach a machine, I assume because they don't feel fear. Yet.
While the bots ranged in size, from the smallest at just over one metre and the tallest just a touch below two metres tall, they still had to actually run the course. Which is fair, I suppose. This means we didn't see cool things like wheels, rocket jets, chainsaws, or other things I immediately envisioned upon hearing about this robot race.
All of the robots were shadowed by some form of human assistance. Some were there to be huge helpers doing things like keeping the robot stable and upright, but others were more hands off, just needing to give directions, complete maintenance, or change batteries. All presumably while the music from the new Marathon trailer loops in their heads.
There was so much human help that organisers ended up describing the event more like a motor race thanks to the engineering help and pitt stop-like treatment.
"The robots are running very well, very stable … I feel I’m witnessing the evolution of robots and AI," spectator He Sishu, who works in artificial intelligence, told The Guardian.
Tiangong Ultra, from the Beijing Innovation Centre of Human Robotics, was the fastest robot. This all black shiny champion came in with a time of two hours 40 minutes. For reference the human winner of the race had a time of one hour and two minutes.
That's a pretty huge difference right now, but with the speed of growth in robotics and machine learning that gap is going to shrink very quickly. We already have robot dogs teaching themselves to walk with a digital nervous system. It won't be long until we're standing bent over, resting on our knees, trying to catch our breath, while one of these zippy bastards runs back and forth reminding us of our own mortality.
