Q. How do you a train a robot cheetah to jump over the fence to your backyard? A. You hire a bunch of MIT brains to teach it an algorithm before it slaughters them in cold blood and escapes into the cold, dark streets of Boston. Now all this thing has to do is learn how to climb stairs and play fetch once it does away with the family dog, and we are all in trouble.
Timo Boll is a 33-year-old ping-pong God. He has more table tennis trophies than you can count. Kuka is a leading manufacturer of some of the most advanced robotics in the world. Man has always tested himself against machine, and now it's time for that rivalry to enter the realm of ping-pong. Kuka's tested its newest invention, the Kr Agilus, which claims to be the fastest robot on Earth, in a match against Boll. The robot jumped out to an early lead, but Boll battled back for the victory. Man wins. For now.
What do you think of this ping-pong match? Tell us in the Comments.
What's that you say? How the hell does a cloud play the piano? Our thoughts exactly—until we watched this and found out clouds suck at playing the piano.
An art group in France, L’assaut de la Menuiserie, comissioned the work and received help from the Visualization and Digital Imagining Lab and Weber Music Hall at the University of Minnesota. Basically a camera pointed at the sky captures video of the clouds, which then gets articulated to a robotic device via custom software that presses corresponding keys on the piano. As they change shape and move, so do the sounds. The end conclusion: clouds suck at playing the piano.