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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Whether or not this is true in every detail, I think the point that it is essentially true is undeniable. And there isn't anything objectively wrong with it, it's just not what we want to watch. Heck, I'm a computer programmer and it's not what I want to watch. If I want to see algorithms running against each other I've got all kinds of other places I can do that.

Let's leave the humans something.

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Where exactly can you watch (as a sport) two algorithms running against each other? Wouldn't that be an awesome new sport? team algorithms fighting against each other. Maybe one was written by some random genius team of programmers to take on the big dog tech companies.

Or maybe a professional robot fight league within google/facebook etc.

See Core War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War and RoboWar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboWar and several others. While First Robotics is not a head-to-head competition, it is also computer (robot) vs. a subset of the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Robotics_Competition / http://www.usfirst.org/

WRT Core War: "The earliest published description of Redcode is found in the Core War Guidelines published in March 1984 by A. K. Dewdney and D. G. Jones."

That could be cool. I suggest watching a sport like F1 where the human element has been reduced significantly in favor of technology. I mean, they have cars with automatic gear boxes now.

As for football, I see it as coaches playing chess with pieces that work only some of the time. Without the player you loose that element of chance that leads to incredible 90 yard one had catches while failing backwards into the end zone and dragging both feet ;p

I'd say the Starcraft AI competitions are a pretty good version of what you are asking about.

They're pretty interesting because there's an APM (actions per minute) cap imposed by the game itself. IIRC, once you approach 2,000 actions per minute, the game stops responding to commands properly.

You only have a small (for a piece of software!) amount of actions you can do for minute, so you have to choose wisely.

While not sports related; this is one example of an genetic algorithm that improves with discarding failures: http://www.boxcar2d.com/index.html

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