Messi vs machine

There’s  a new distraction for those left suddenly bereft after the month-long carnival of football in Brazil culminated in delight for Germany and despair for everyone else. Another tournament, also in Brazil, is here to help manage those withdrawal symptoms. Only this one, for all the Teutonic caricatures about the winning German team, will be played by actual and not metaphorical robots. RoboCup, first held in 1997, is a competition that aims to produce a humanoid robot team that could take on flesh and blood opponents, and win, by 2050. Over the next few days, 550 teams from 45 countries will put on a festival of motherboards and silicon circuitry programmed to hit the back of the net, with nary a chomp or broken back to distract from the serious business of scoring goals.
Panicky homo sapiens fearing extinction at the hands of robot soon-to-be-overlords will be encouraged to learn that the android-y footballers only recently figured out how to stay upright. But it was a short step from there to making passes and scoring goals on purpose and so there is, perhaps, a whiff of the inevitable about a robot versus enhanced human matchup in 2050. Only half a decade separates America’s first electronic computer and the IBM supercomputer beating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. Yet, if purists are scandalised at the prospect of football losing its trademark values of diving and fouling, they can take heart. Robots may ape human traits like shoving and pushing to gain an advantage, even though a hungry robot is unlikely to bite into an opponent’s tempting shoulder, unless they are more cylon than C3PO.

Still, when the robocalypse finally arrives, let’s hope that the fate of humanity will not be determined on penalty kicks.