It’s robocurler!
Meet Curly the ice king - who’s beaten best humans
IT is a sport whose unique blend of skill, strategy and teamwork usually takes many years to master.
But now some of the world’s best curlers have been beaten by a relative novice – and he can’t even hold a broom.
Scientists say the world’s first robot curling champion shows that ‘thinking’ computers can work in the real world.
Named Curly, he delivers the traditional granite stone without sweeping the ice.
In a contest against players from the South Korean national team, he won an astonishing three out of four matches.
Professor Dong-Ok Won, a specialist in cognitive engineering at Korea University in Seoul, said: ‘These results indicate the gap between physics-based simulators and the real world can be narrowed.’
He said his team had developed ‘a new artificial intelligence program that allowed Curly to successfully compete and win against leading human opponents’.
Those included top-ranked wombased en’s curling teams and Korea’s national wheelchair reserve team.
Professor Won said: ‘Curling has been described as a combination of bowling and chess. It is a turngame in which two teams play alternately on the ice sheet, requiring a high level of strategic thinking and performance.’
Curling is one of the world’s oldest sports, having been played in Scotland for at least 500 years.
The researchers used a technique called deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which is based on a system of trial and error.
This enabled Curly to compensate for uncertainties that are an unavoidable part of the game.
The artificial intelligence program captured information about changing conditions on the ice sheet through the robot’s mistakes in previous throws.
The system meant Curly only needed to complete a couple of calibration moves beforehand to detect changes on the ice.
Professor Won said he could now report ‘a curling robot that can achieve human-level performance in the game of curling using an adaptive DRL framework’.
He added: ‘The game of curling can be considered a good test-bed for studying the interaction between AI and the real world.’
MARCH OF THE MACHINES 2