We will soon be watching robots play sports. How’s that going?
PLUS a Word Salad about 4D Chess, Product Answer, and some things to think about
It’s so fine to be back home with glorious sunny weather, and feeling great about the direction of my writing. I want to highlight a great reader headline from Wyrd Smythe that I wished I had used for my synopsis of the latest nuclear reactor:
“Thorium reactors are da bomb. Oh, wait, actually they aren't.”
PRODUCT ANSWER
The numbers are gradually sneaking up in the weekly Experimental Recipe / New Product poll. We had two winners this week, though one admitted she had seen the product on CNET. This is an example of a quite useful new product. It is a rechargeable, paper-based battery that uses water so it is fireproof (that is, not a lithium battery). The battery is designed with a low environmental footprint to be used for small electronics and wearables, and then recycled or composted. Great!
The purpose for this section - on top of me having some fun and getting a bit of a laugh - is to take the air out of the Silicon Valley start-up mythology of “solving huge problems for human good at a profit”.
QUICKBYTE: Robots running in a half marathon has some problems
On Monday I hypothesized sarcastically that 2085’s major new science and research announcements would be based on research that was scrubbed in 2025 by DOGE. By then I also expect we will be watching sports played only by robots who will be faster, more athletic, smarter, and better looking than humans. However, first efforts in that direction are not that good.
Let’s start at the top with the best news. 12,000 humans and 21 robots ran in a half marathon in Beijing on April 19th, though they were separated on the track. Six robots finished (no word on the number of human finishers as a comparison) and the top robot (pictured above) finished in 2 hours and 40 minutes compared to the human time cut off of 3 hours and 10 minutes. “The shortest (robot) was 2' 5" tall. Sporting a blue and white tracksuit and waving to onlookers every few seconds, it was probably the crowd favorite. The tallest, at 5'9", was the winner Tiangong Ultra”. They all had to be bipedal, like we are.
Robotics experts stated that it is amazing that robots are even able to do this much, and shows how quickly development has progressed. However, I have been through too many hype cycles of everything from autonomous cars to the metaverse to accept these accolades at face value. So let’s take a deep dive shall we? (irony of me using a cliched phrase is intentional)
And dive they did. Every robot fell. Many more than once. Many needed to be picked up. All of the robots needed battery swaps. Many more than once. (As far as I know no humans stopped to eat). All of the robots overheated. Some of them smoked from their heads. To cool off they had to be sprayed by their support teams. Many robots could not follow the course and crashed into obstacles. Some spun around erratically.
“One robot called Huanhuan, which has a humanlike head, only moved at the speed of a snail for a few minutes while its head shook uncontrollably—as if it could fall off any time.” Plenty of duct tape was used for repairs. Some robots were held in check using leashes, much like dangerous pets. Every robot had one or more human operators who were permitted to even change to another robot when the first one was, well too broken to continue. I guess the robots haven’t been programmed yet to just push through when they “hit the wall”. Although some literally hit walls.
All in all great fun for the family, provided you were behind protective barriers!
So we are some ways away from a George Clooney or Denzel Washington looking robot dunk a basketball through a 25 foot high hoop. Mind you progress will be nonlinear. That means starting very slowly and doing insignificant little things. This week I heard an interview with Daniela Rus a robotics expert and the head of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her prediction for home robots looking ahead 20 years (to 2045) is of modest labour saving robots. Like one specialized just for clothes folding on laundry day or another one to pick up and put away toys that your kids have left around the house.
Call me underwhelmed. I’m disappointed that Rosie, promised to us by those futurists The Jetsons, may not happen in my lifetime.
WORD SALAD - 4-D chess
I’m going to be short and blunt on this brand new cliché that has popped into the vernacular describing the supposed multi-faceted and complex international financial strategies implemented by Trump. Strategies that are changed, revised, revoked or re-implemented daily.
Some have even used 5D or higher to describe Trumps moves. If you were satirical kudos. If you weren’t, you are literally living in some other dimension. (Consult superstring theory to determine where)
Because 4D stands for 4 dimensions. Let’s go through them shall we, starting with the spatial ones
Width
Length
Height
Normally, time is considered the 4th dimension.
Ordinary chess the game is played on a 2 dimensional board, with pieces that are in the third dimension - height. Two players then move the various pieces as time passes. Hence 4D chess.
A key question arises: can Trump even play ordinary chess? Meaningfully. My bet is that he cannot. He would be pissed that the King - which he aims to be - can only move one space at a time, only slightly better than pawns.
Now I have played a variation of chess that uses a 3 dimensional board, which makes it more complex. That makes sense, a 3-D chess board. So what on earth could a 4D chess board be?
This all feels like smug yet unconscious self parody to me. Do these people really have the mathematical backgrounds to talk n-dimensional space? Or are they just social platform parrots?
A LITTLE SPICE
“We must learn to live in the world as we find it and to see it as clearly as we can. This is no simple task. It is easier to seek out the comforts of groupthink, prejudice, and ignorance. Resisting those temptations requires vigilance, discipline, and curiosity.”
AO Scott
WHAT’S REALLY COOKING
I was talking with my great Substack friend Neela about comparative doom scenarios. Hers was digital decay; mine was the “for all intents and purposes” extinction of homo sapiens (I encourage people to join Substack now as this is an example of the lovely conversations one has when one finds community)
So, in what year do you think homo sapiens goes extinct?
Hopefully see you next Monday. Thanks all for reading, especially those with feedback that I get to think about and digest.
Ah, no wonder my ears were burning when I woke up today. 😃
I'm thoroughly underwhelmed by robots running races. Cars go faster than even a horse, planes can fly, and bulldozers move a lot more earth than a human can. The whole point of machines is that they can do things we can't. But what possible value is there in watching sports played by machines? The whole point of a sport is human excellence. Baseball, for example, involves the very edge of human performance in pitching and batting (and catching and running bases). Robot sports sound as interesting as watching a washing machine.
The failure of the robot "racers" reminds me of the self-driving car races they used to have in the SoCal desert. At least for the first few years, none ever finished, and many were in trouble early on. At least eventually.
I doubt P45&47 can even play checkers, let alone chess. And not only would the single-space King annoy him, so would the power of the Queen. I suspect people are just brown-nosing when they claim he's doing something adult and sophisticated.
[Just to be pedantic, computer chess is entirely 2D. And in cases like this, I do not consider time a dimension. Only orthogonal Euclidean directions need apply. One could, I think, design a 4D chess game. There is a 4D Rubik's Cube. Visualization is a bit of a trick.]
I don't know that we'd ever completely extinguish ourselves given how spread out we. It's not impossible, though, but I suspect it's more likely we'd make things so bad that billions perish and the human race is reduced to much simpler times. The real problem is that "sapiens" means "one who knows" or "wisdom", and we've never really lived up to that name.
Digital decay versus the extinction of homo sapiens. hmmmm
Could both of these scenarios happen simultaneously? We’re already seeing the digital space crumble under misinformation and tech dependence, while humanity, with all its ummmm BS, may very well evolve into something unrecognizable over the next few weeks LOL. Let’s just hope we don’t go extinct before we can appreciate the beauty of progress or at least a few good jokes along the way.
Thank you for the mention here.
Happy Freaking Friday David.