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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

Why care about racing when a motor vehicle can do travel at speed better, by that logic?

Boxing vs. gun fight. Fencing vs. well, gun fight. Swimming vs. motorboats? Bobsleigh vs... gravity?

In most sports it's possible to find a machine that does it better/faster, but sports are about humans measuring themselves against one another, not against a machine.

There are still quite a bit of sports where machines can’t compete, like tennis or soccer.

Only if you consider that the machine should act like a human player. We can definitely build machines that beat humans in both tennis and soccer every single time.

How would that soccer player look? I don’t think we can build a machine that is good at soccer.

Once you remove the requirement that it look or act like a human, there's plenty of (pointless) ways you could make robots beat humans at football. A drone could pick up the ball and fly it into the goal without breaking the rules because the rules assume that to carry the ball it would need to touch your hands or arms (which the drone doesn't have). Build another robot that's the exact size of the goal, and too heavy to move off the goal line, hey presto the other team can't score.

I think this line of thinking only makes sense if either you do require the robots to behave like humans (opposite of the comment you replied to), or by rewriting the rules of the game completely.

But then it wouldn't be soccer any more. Of course you could just build a high wall over the field so the opponents are physically prohibited to score. I'm quite sure that still is prohibited, even if you call the wall a player.

I don't think you need the players to look like humans, but you have to in some way keep the spirit of the game. For example, you can't pick up the ball and hold it while you move, but have to roll or bounce it in front of yourself (dribble).

That's my point, that for it to make sense they either need to be restricted to acting like humans or the rules of the game need to be updated to suit robots in which case it's not the same sport any more, even if the rules are changed to keep it as close to human football as possible as you suggest.

*yet.

Also used to be true for chess.

The guy from "Stuff Made Here" builds all sorts of sports machines: a gun-powered golf club, a basketball hoop that's impossible to miss, etc. I think he would be able to make a tennis playing machine that aces every single service shot (if he's not working on that already! ;-)

A very easy way to do it would just be to serve the ball at > 400km/h. It's unlikely that a human could accurately return a ball at that speed more than 50% of the time.

I don’t know the rules of tennis well enough, but would it be enough to just have an unreturnable serve to win, even if you can’t return anything yourself?

no, you have to win by two games. So you have to be able to win once with your opponent serving.

> (if he's not working on that already! ;-)

Right now he seems to be occupied with his automatic puzzle solver. Based on the first video it looks like it'll take a while.

Good question... Why should we care?

It's like "okay, here we have a bunch of genetically gifted people who spend their whole lives training for that. Why should we care whether someone can run 100m in less than 10s or not? What difference does it make to any of us if Usain Bolt is the fastest man to run the 200m on a very controlled environment?"

This is not to say that running as an activity is useless, or that we should give up on exercising. I don't know if that is the point from OP, but I myself do question why we collectively think that is so important to devote so much time and resources in trying to optimize for these crazy, arbitrarily-constrained scenarios that we call "sports".

The answer is entertainment. I don’t care about any sports (though after a brief stint in watching LoL esports around 2011-2014, I at least understand the theoretical appeal), but many people do. Others don’t care about music. Or about films. But in the end all of it is bread and games.

Entertainment works as an answer of why we do it, but not the question I made, which is why/whether we should.

This is only a distinction if you consider entertainment without value

Not really. I am questioning "sports following as entertainment", not entertainment in general.

Your argument is valid, but it should be noted that the best autonomous racing cars in the world would get absolutely trounced by even amateur racing drivers.

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