Robot runner handily beats humans in half-marathon, setting new record

A humanoid robot took the fastest half-marathon record away from human athletes.

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[Snark218]

This should not be a particularly warm take, but....

A humanoid robot took the fastest half-marathon record away from human athletes.

No. No it did not. A humanoid robot is doing something categorically different than a human athlete. The two do not compete. The two cannot compete. The only thing that robot is doing that's even faintly related to running a marathon is bipedal locomotion, and only in that way is it any different than a remote control car driving 13.1 miles - a task that is trivial for almost any self-propelled machine with a battery or energy source capable of powering it for whatever amount of time it takes to traverse that distance. Let's not trivialize human accomplishments.

 

[Snark218]

thats.. the entire point though?

That is literally the point though?? Like, yes, that is indeed the difference between a marathon and a nascar race.

A humanoid robot capable of running without a harness did not even exist 10 years ago.

Those are accomplishments in robotics, not athletics.

 

[Snark218]

And thanks to Jeremy Hsu for this -

Jeremy Hsu
Thanks for weighing in, this is a very fair point. I've updated the story dek

Always appreciate when writers are responsive to editorial feedback.

 

[Snark218]

I'm quite sure that none of the 12000 human runners felt their achievement was in any way trivialized by the robot. Nor by Jacob Kiplimo's 57:20 time.

Probably not, because they weren't actually in competition with the robot, or Jacob Kiplimo.

 

[Snark218]

It's not really clear that people agree on that, considering the silly comments about cars doing it faster.

That's the goal post moving, just making it about whatever else. Obviously the story is about bipedal robots.

I'm reasonably sure this isn't aimed at me, but for the record I don't think it moved the goalposts anywhere to criticize that framing. It was a very impressive achievement in robotics and engineering - it just didn't constitute breaking an athletic record and I thought there were some problems in framing the comparison that way.

 

[Snark218]

Just like me when I did a half marathon.

I have heard some stories about chafing and friction to certain body parts during marathons and ultras that made those parts of my body shrink and/or retract.

 

[Snark218]

The robots set a new record, for robots. That record is faster than humans.

That's information, and context. There was no talk of the human record somehow being irrelevant now. I don't know who you think you're arguing with honestly.

Well, the subhead I objected to has been revised, so, no, I'm not arguing agains anything at this point.

 

[Snark218]

Look, I'm not out here cheerleading for killer robots, just to be clear.

But is it really hard to think of scenarios where something that has similar capabilities and build to a human would be useful? You're in an urban environment chasing a suspect and they go down some stairs. They duck down a narrow alley. They vault over a wall.

The world is built for human being to access. Wheeled vehicles are confined to places where we allow them, for the most part.

Now, if your goal is to simply win a road race then sure this isn't the idea form. But that's not the be all, end all goal here.

I would tend to think that something with 4-6 legs based on a spider- or insect-like form factor would tend to work better for the specific "COPS intro scene" use case; basically, something that self-stabilizes and has more than two points of contact so it can skitter rapidly over various surfaces. As the poor guy tripping over the hump and falling apart attests, bipedalism has some inherent stability issues that a million or so years of evolution has dealt with, and engineering has done so only so far. And even still, ask a typical human in unexceptional physical condition to freerun an urban environment; chances of that being more funny than impressive are good.

But for us, the advantage of bipedalism is that it allows us to breathe independently of what our legs are doing; most quadrupedal runners compress and expand their thoraxes with every bound, putting a hard bound on their respiratory rate. Humans are fairly unique in that we're not super fast runners, but we can run all goddamn day if needed, very efficiently, to run down a kudu or whatever until it just keels over from exhaustion. If you don't have to worry about respiration and you just want to design something that can efficiently and rapidly traverse uneven and varied terrain without doing a face-plant, I think that pushes you off in another direction in design space than either wheels or two legs. Roaches and spiders do a bang-up job of accessing parts of the world humans access, not to mention traversing them rapidly after you turn the light on while dodging la chancla. Even dogs and cats are pretty effective at it.

Or, to make it a little less grim, there's been an earthquake and people are trapped under rubble. Your tank rolling over them isn't very helpful in any of these situations.

The Japanese are developing snakebots to do earthquake SAR, interestingly.