All Over The Map

I am just not into most sports with me as the player or the observer. It isn’t that I never tried them. I actually played little league baseball and was a big NY Knicks fan during the DeBusschere, Frazier, Reed, Monroe, Bradley, Barnett era.  So I don’t like Robots playing sports because it makes me feel good to see a Robot win, I find it encouraging — sports may be where humans are performing at peak physical and sensory input levels — watching  machines approach that using different technologies can lead to many good things.  I wonder what the handicaps will be for that inevitable day when there is machine human competition, maybe an Electro Magnetic Pulse generator directed at the 1 cm diameter vulnerability area. I came across a news story about Soccer Playing Robots www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/small/ that prompted this blog entry. I was feeling encouraged about the progress and then brought down to earth by the “experts” view that it will be 2050 before a robot can play against a human in soccer. I, who really know very little about this, think they are way off. I bet the next Trillion dollar Market Cap will have roots back to participants to events such as the one in the following video.

When will I be able to buy a tennis ball pickup machine/robot for under 200.00? Of course it might be better to pick each ball up yourself and remember how it ended up there but a video with analysis would be more to my liking. Cheap personal “form” analysis seems like it would be useful, maybe it would help me exercise more, unlikely.