经济学人下载:机器人世界杯

RoboCup
机器人世界杯

Humans 1, Machines 7
人机对战1:7

When will robots do to football what computers did to chess?
当机器人踢足球能和电脑下象棋一样好的时候

MESSI v the Machine was how some commentators touted the World Cup final, inspired by the disciplined way the German team dismantled Brazil in the semi-finals. But despite such caricatures of Teutonic precision, German players are only human. So as the latest edition of RoboCup, a competition for robot soccer players rather than flesh-and-blood ones, kicks off on July 19th in Jo?o Pessoa, Brazil's easternmost city, a question that will be on many minds is: when will real machines conquer the sport?
世界杯半决赛中，德国干掉了巴西。受这种一板一眼的踢法的刺激，一些评论人员戏称世界杯决赛为“梅西对战机器”。但是尽管我们这样讽刺条顿式精密，德国队员也仍是人类。而机器人世界杯则是机器足球运动员的赛事，无关有血有肉的人类。因此，今年7月19日，当机器人世界杯在巴西最东端的城市圣保罗开赛的时候，许多人开始考虑：真的机器，什么时候会统治足球运动？

When the first RoboCup was held, in 1997, those who launched it set a target of 2050 for engineers to produce a humanoid robot team that would rival the champions of the older competition. Judged by the plodding clumsiness of some of the RoboCup players, that goal might seem far-fetched. But it is easy to underestimate how quickly robotics is improving. Self-driving cars and delivery drones, which seemed hopelessly futuristic just a decade ago, are now topics of serious business interest.
1997年，第一届机器人世界杯举行的时候，创始者们设定的目标是2050年，工程师能开发出类人的机器队伍，媲美旧有比赛的冠军。通过一些机器人世界杯队员的沉重步伐来看， 这个目标还遥遥无期。但是人们往往会低估机器人发展的速度。无人驾驶汽车和无人运输机十年前看上去也是遥不可及的，如今已成为严肃的商业兴趣点。

By comparison with the corporate investments of the likes of Google in electric cars, the teams competing in this year's RoboCup—more than 150 of them—have shoestring budgets. But the tournament includes features that the organisers hope will accelerate innovation without the incentive of cash.
对比谷歌因对电动汽车的偏好而进行的合作投资，今年机器人世界杯的150多支队伍的预算不过是毛毛雨。但是比赛有这样一个特点，组织方希望在没有资本刺激的情况下加速创新。

One is a clever combination of competition and co-operation. Leading up to the playoffs, teams prepare new strategies and fine-tune their hardware and software in secret. Immediately after the finals have been played, however, all must publish their methods, thus raising the bar for everyone the following year. Another feature is that there are limits to how far teams can push their hardware, to encourage them to develop smart routes to victory, rather than using mere brute force.
这项赛事是对竞争和合作的良好结合。进入了季后赛，各队都会秘密准备新战术，调整软硬件。然而，决赛一旦结束，所有人都要公开他们的方法，由此给其他人在明年的比赛提供参照。另一项特质是对于队伍对硬件做的改进是有上限的，以鼓励他们开发智能方案赢得胜利，而不是仅仅通过粗鲁的物理性能。

A further twist is that RoboCup is not one competition but many. These range from a little league of miniature cylinders on wheels, like the “Star Wars” character R2-D2, in which each entire team is controlled by one computer using input from overhead cameras, to a fully limbed humanoid league, akin to R2-D2's faithful companion, C-3PO (see picture above). In the humanoid league, which is further divided into three sizes of robot—kid, teen and adult—each android has its own independent on-board sensors and artificial-intelligence software.
更深一步的是，机器人世界杯不是一项比赛，而是一系列比赛。其范围包括微型有轮缸式的小联赛，到完全类人化的队伍。前者类似“星球大战”中的R2D2，整个队伍由一台电脑控制，输入端为上空的摄像头。后者好比R2D2的忠实队友C3PO（见上图）。在类人队伍中，根据其不同的尺寸又分为小孩，青少年和成人，每个机器人都有其独立的自带传感器，以及拟人智能软件。

Moreover, for those who cannot be bothered to get out the spanners and the soldering iron, there is a virtual league as well. Competition there can focus on improving the software needed for the rapid planning of the best move at each step of the game, without having to worry about the vagaries of the hardware. And there is also a junior league for school-aged geeks, some of whom will no doubt join the RoboCup major leagues when they go to college, their skills already finely honed.
更有甚者，对于那些不善于使用扳手和焊接工具的人，也有虚拟队伍。此处的比赛主要专注于能在比赛中快速规划出最佳行动的软件，而不在意硬件的搭配。还有校园极客的初级队伍，他们在进入大学后无疑会加入机器人世界杯，毕竟他们的技巧已经经过考验。

To sense the state-of-the-art in robot football, you need to go behind the scenes. Last week, hidden in a windowless office, Joydeep Biswas of Carnegie Mellon University and his colleagues were making final adjustments to their team, which competes in the little league. While robots in the humanoid league are still lumbering and prone to error, the speed and accuracy of those in the little league are stunning. Their electromechanical kickers can fire the league's orange golf balls at eight metres per second. In fact, they could easily shoot harder if it were not for hardware-control regulations that set a maximum speed.
为了体验机器人足球的先进性，你要走近荧幕背后。上周，躲在一件无窗办公室中，卡内基·梅隆大学的Joydeep Biswas和他的伙伴对队伍进行最后的调整。他们将在小联赛中出现。尽管类人组机器人依然胡拼乱造而且容易出故障，其在小联赛中的速度和精确性都有大幅提高。他们的电力学球员能够以每秒八米的速度将比赛用橙色高尔夫球踢出去。实际上，如果不是硬件控制限制了最大速度的话，他们能够踢得更狠。

The state of play
踢球的状态

Mr Biswas, a graduate student, works for Manuela Veloso. She helped found RoboCup and her group has won the most finals titles in the little league. In 2009 Dr Veloso and her colleagues decided to share with their competitors the vision software that had let their team win a streak of RoboCups. This helped establish the now-mandatory open-source approach that has rapidly raised the quality of the competition.
研究生Biswas先生为Manuela Veloso工作。她帮助成立了机器人世界杯，而她的团队已经赢得了小联赛中的多数头衔。2009年Veloso博士及她的团队决定同他们的竞争对手分享帮助他们赢得了一系列机器人世界杯的视觉软件。这引导建立了如今的强制开源规则，并快速提升了比赛的质量。

“In the past couple of years,” Dr Veloso opines, “one of the big changes is that we are starting to analyse real football tactics and strategy, to devise our own.” A paper her group published earlier this year lays out how their CMDragons team observed and exploited the defence tactics of opponents, luring them away from positions where they could prevent goals. This approach, dubbed “coerce and attack”, has parallels in professional playbooks.
Veloso博士说，“在过去的几年，一项巨大的改变是我们开始分析实际足球技巧和策略，并衍生出我们自己的。”今年早些时候，她的团队发表的一篇文章，说明了他们这个CMDragons团队如何观测并利用选手的防守战略，引诱他们远离能阻止球的防守位置。这个方法被叫做“威逼后攻击”，已经出现在专业玩家手册中。

Other research groups are getting equally sophisticated, and teams from Australia, China, Iran and Thailand, among other countries, are regularly placed high in several leagues of the competition—in contrast to their national reputations on real pitches. In the early years of RoboCup, there were huge differences in quality between the teams. No longer. The best of the little league routinely finish their ten-minute-long games with the low scores characteristic of well-matched human teams. Indeed, Dr Veloso's squad came in second last year, after a penalty shoot-out following a 2-2 game.
其他的研究团队也变得同样的厉害。在所有国家中，来自澳大利亚，中国，伊朗和泰国的队伍，同该国在实际比赛中的名声相比，处在比赛的领头羊地位。在机器人世界杯早些时候，各队在质量上大有不同。这一幕已成为历史。小联赛的佼佼者一般在10分钟的比赛中以小比分结束，同人类队伍间的比赛相仿。实际上，去年一场2-2的比赛结束后，Veloso的小队在点球大战中憾负中国队，屈居第二。

Nor need only the players be robots. In a step that many of FIFA's critics may admire, Dr Veloso and her team are developing automated referees. That will not stop some teams from exploiting decidedly human traits, such as fouling by forcefully bumping into another robot. But it may result in more effective enforcement of things like the maximum kick-speed rule.
而且不仅仅运动员是机器人。许多世界杯批评人士可能会羡慕的是，Veloso博士及其团队正在开发自动裁判。这不会阻止一些队伍触犯人类比赛中的规则，比如有力地碰撞另一个机器人。但其可能导致更有效的强化诸如最大踢球速度限制这样的规定。

What fascinates Dr Veloso most about RoboCup is the execution, during the game, of moves that had not been deliberately inserted into the algorithms controlling the robots. She is ebullient about an unexpected three-way pass and chip, worthy of a minor Messi and his Argentine teammates. Such unanticipated plays are examples of emergent behaviour, a hallmark of artificial intelligence at its highest level, and something she reckons RoboCup teams in all leagues will produce a lot more of with each passing year.
机器世界杯最吸引Veloso博士的的地方在于，比赛期间，对运动的执行不是事先设定在控制机器人的算法中。她乐于见到三角传球过人，就像参照梅西和他的阿根廷队友。这种意外的踢法是紧急处理中的例子，标志着人工智能的最高水平。她认为，每年机器世界杯各项比赛的队伍会产生越来越多的闪光点。

So is 2050 an unrealistic deadline for robots to beat the best humans at football? Half a century is roughly the time that separates ENIAC, America's first electronic computer, from Deep Blue, the IBM machine that beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. Judged in that light, RoboCup's goal does not seem absurd. Indeed, the question may be whether, come 2050, there are still any human football players around who have not been prosthetically enhanced in some way, making them cyborgs. RoboCup v RoboCop, anyone?
2050年是不是虚拟的截止日期，那时候机器人会在足球方面打败人类？从美国第一台电子计算机ENIAC到1997年IBM生产出打败世界象棋大师Garry Kasparov的深蓝，大概过去了一个世纪。由此判断，机器人世界杯看上去并不荒唐。事实上，问题可能是到了2050年的时候，还有没有足球运动员在某方面没有进行强化，变成半机械人？机器人世界杯，还是半机器人世界杯？