In Beijing this week, at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games, a two-legged robot ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds, against Usain Bolt’s record of 9.58. More impressive than the robot’s speed is the rate of improvement: last year’s winning machine took 21.5 seconds, more than twice as long. In the standing high jump, the best result tripled over the past year.
Nothing alive improves like that. What improved was not a body but the knowledge shared among 666 teams from sixteen countries, who spent a year learning from one another’s results. The machines are the medium. The contest is between minds.
Consider what kind of contests these are. Schiller, explaining why the ideal forms of a Venus or an Apollo are to be sought in Greece rather than Rome, described a people who delighted “in the athletic sports in Olympia, in the bloodless contests of strength, of speed, of agility, and in the nobler combat of talents”—as against a people who relished “the death throes of a slain gladiator.” Strength, speed, agility: the Beijing program includes weightlifting, the 100 meter dash, and tai chi.
Beside them sits touhu, pitch-pot, descended from Zhou-dynasty archery ritual, in which players throw arrows into a narrow-necked vase. Confucius held that the gentleman has nothing to contend for; if he must contend, it is in archery. “Before mounting the stairs to the archery hall, gentlemen bow and defer to one another, and after descending from the hall they mutually offer up toasts. This is how a gentleman ‘competes,’” he is recorded as saying in the Analects.
Two civilizations arrived separately at the same thought—that the worthiest contest is a bloodless one, and that what it measures is not force but cultivation. The machines competing in Beijing this week are built to demonstrate what their makers understand.
The same day that Beijing reported on the event, news about American sports appeared in a medical journal article concluding that at least one in four NFL (American professional football) players is likely to develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
