(Credit:
Wikimedia)
After attempts to "crowdsource" the purchase of a soccer club, it was obviously just a matter of time until the concept of crowdsourcing--the act of outsourcing a job or task to a group of people--would be applied to the actual game.
The Israeli team Hapoel Play65 Kiryat Shalom, a shared project of the online backgammon room Play65 and the Israeli social network for sports fans Web2sport, prides itself on being the first Web 2.0 soccer club in the world.
The club has begun experimenting with a wisdom-of-the-fans approach that allows the team's supporters to monitor the game online and suggest starting lineup, tactics, and substitutions--in other words be the manager and coach. On the club's Web site, fans can drag virtual players into their preferred positions on a pitch diagram. The information is then collated and the players who get the most votes line up for the next match.
Ahead of the season's opening match, some 6,000 people took advantage of this opportunity. However, it remains disputable whether the wisdom of the crowd can match the solitary genius of star coaches like Arsene Wenger (Arsenal London) or Frank Rijkaard (FC Barcelona): in its first crowdsourced game, Hapoel Play65 Kiryat Shalom lost 3-2 to Maccabi Ironi Or Yehuda in injury time.
We run till the sun implodes
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)CHIBA, Japan--Citizen's micro robots come in peace.
The watch company, which also makes a wide variety of industrial-grade precision components, has come up with a couple of robot kits designed to get kids interested in the field.
The Eco-drive robots--the three robots with faces and watches on top in that first picture--are powered by gears and mechanisms in the watch. Although the watch is turning the gears of the robot, it continues to function normally. The whole thing is powered by a solar panel.
The system will work "as long as there is light or until breaking," Citizen said in the poster accompanying the robots. Citizen showed them off last week at Ceatec, the large trade show here.
robot, robot oi, oi, oi
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)The other robots, meanwhile, are guided by an infrared beam coming from above. (The infrared beam, in turn, is controlled by someone sitting at a computer or by a preprogrammed application. Take your pick.)
As depicted here, the infrared beam can have the robots chasing a beam of regular light--in effect, playing soccer. Right now, these two guys in the second picture--about an inch and a half tall--are getting in each other's way, but they move fairly fast. There were five in all scurrying about.
You just can't get enough of robots at this show, or in Japan for that matter. Very few companies actually have enjoyed success with their anthropomorphic robots, but they continue to crank them out, hoping that some day a hit will emerge. NEC showed off its PaPeRo robot again, a cute little number that talks to you, delivers weather reports and warns you when burglars enter the house. (Security systems are huge sellers in Japan, although it has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.). Vstone also showed off the Robovie-R, which is similar to PaPeRo but taller.
RoboCup 2007, the international robot soccer, rescue and home chore competition, concluded Sunday night with an awards ceremony, but some are still wondering who won.
The organization used Wikipedia as a central location from which to post results for its different events, but the information from many links remained incomplete as of Monday afternoon. It's left some followers of the event flummoxed.
About 300 teams, comprising 1,700 people from 37 countries, participated in RoboCup 2007, which was held this year at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
The event to promote artificial intelligence and robotics included soccer games, search-and-rescue missions and home assistance tasks performed by humanoid and legged robots of various sizes, as well as soccer drills with microscopic robots. This year an aerial robotics competition was also added to the list of events.
"The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is to, by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer," according to the organization's mission statement.
Award for the Best Humanoid Robot seems to have gone to Team Osaka from Japan for their kid-size humanoid soccer robots, while the award for soccer with medium-size robots went to the Tribots from the University of Osnabruck in Germany. (That's based on wading through schedule charts posted on the RoboCup 2007 Wikipedia site.)
Results for the RoboCup 2007 legged league, those programming legged robots such as the Sony Aibo to play soccer, were clear. The Northern Bites, a team from Bowdoin College in Maine, are the RoboCup 2007 soccer champs, according to the college's press office, as well as the Northern Bites' team blog. The team plans to go see the new Transformers movie as part of their celebratory activities. A German team comprising students from Humboldt Universitat Berlin, Universitat Bremen and Technische Universitat Darmstadt took first place for the technical challenge.
RoboCup 2007 Junior, the competition for elementary through high school students, included three categories: soccer, dance and rescue. Those winners have not yet been posted.
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