THE ROBOT OLYMPICS

GLASGOW Central gym of the University of Strathclyde, County Glasgow, in Cathedral street, the drizzling morning of September 28, 1990. The first international robot Olympics are taking place, as Isaac Asimov, the ideologue of the famous Three Laws of Robotics, would once have predicted. Sixty competitors representing thirteen nations, but with Italy absent. Robots are the last, authentic amateurs in a world that has denied de Coubertin. Research institutes from the world's most prestigious universities train champions of artificial intelligence. It didn't take long to tickle the ambitions and self-love of cybernetics, bionics, computer scientists. Sponsoring scientists costs very little: a few thousand pounds, for the first Robot olympics. The future is a great attraction. Especially if the future can be impersonated by a personal, a video, a contraption that is conventionally called a robot. So, large crowds: especially young people. Sorcerer's apprentices, recalled by the event. The robots are all there, as models of a fashion show, waiting for the performance. The Soviet RPV1 climber clinging like a spider to the wall advances hand in hand with British counterpart Zig Zag. And again: Yamabico of the Japanese Shooji Suzuki, an eye-catching assistant at the Intelligent Robot Laboratory of the University of Tsukuba, the legendary city of Japanese sciences, ready for the obstacle race in which he enrolled together with thirteen other fierce competitors who even came from Mexico. God save the queen resounds, but the notes of the British anthem are immediately swallowed by the less austere notes of the Simple Minds, the Beatles of Glasgow. It's time to compete. Judges armed with stopwatch and boards call the competitors back to their duties. Shadow walker, the only anthropomorphic robot (at least up to the waist) is motionless. A rock. His relays don't activate his legs. Rich Browning's software had provided for him the race and the race of words: on the computer screen there are useless instructions. Hands in the hair of the Shadow staff, a London group of amateurs of science. Richard Walker, the designer, a Cambridge (mathematics) student masks the debasement with proud pride: Our prototype will demonstrate the absolute superiority of leg technology over wheel advocates. Yes: there is also this controversy among robot scientists. The advantages of the wheels instead of the legs (high maneuverability, low energy consumption, symmetrical rotations, excellent traction) are challenged by the proponents of the return to nature. With some small variable: Why persist in using only two legs, when we can use eight, why use two eyes, when we can add five more?, argued with impetus and very Anglo-Saxon humour Jim Alty, the director of research at the Turing Institute, during the seminar that preceded the Robot olympics. The legs do, but not the man's. Those of insects: We understand our limits. We escaped from science fiction, we're back to the world, to nature. We try to achieve a certain harmony between man and machines. Robots will be able to replace humans - already they do so in many industries - in the most hostile environments, where radiation and poisoning are risked, or in mines, or underwater at great depths. The general trend, therefore, adds Peter Mowforth, is to transfer elements of artificial intelligence to the machines, helping them to analyze the environment around them. In a word, helping them to choose. Let's see them, these thinking robots (or almost). At eleven and twenty-five is expected the speed race between the robots with more than four legs. In the first lane, here's the favorite. Indeed, the favorite: Penelope, Scottish. Invented by the team of Professor James Todd of the University of Edinburgh: a huge metal insect 80 centimeters long, 60 wide and 50 high. Fifteen kilos of shiny steel and gears to show that Nature can help robotics: Let's not exaggerate, for now we are content to simulate the movements of the legs of a very simple insect, he hastens to say Todd. Penelope's are eight well-tumbled legs, capable of overcoming steps and slopes of 25 percent. Opponents smile for fair play. Martin Snaith, immortalized by the Economist, long hair at the nazarene, of the Technology Applications (TAG) of Alnwick in Northumberland, able to climb, walk, scour, locate and overcome any obstacles with his quadruped Igor, five kilos of threads and plungers equipped with sonar antennas and green bulbs. The American Rodney Brooks of MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the futuristic minirobot Genghis, thirty centimeters, terrible exapode rich in sensors and able to coordinate the six legs with its parallel processors and interaction with sophisticated programs, smiles with grinded teeth. Go! Get out! Twenty-five seconds split and Penelope crosses the finish line first, four yards, just over three and a half yards. Genghis is disoriented, it takes a minute and 5 seconds, but when he arrives he throws his head forward like Carl Lewis. Igor, poor thing, duck: two minutes and ten, shame. The flashes disoriented him. So much, the Olympics will not win them: but the Japanese Yamabiko who exploits the wheels and not the legs, ready to avoid - when he succeeds - obstacles with his telemetric eye, the last child of the aggressive technology of the Rising Sun. The crystal robot, a coveted Olympic trophy, thus ends up in the hands of the only Japanese competitor.