Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/11/battlebot-for-sale-gently-used.html
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I saw this before but have avoided reading about it too much because I haven’t started watching the new seasons yet. Y’know, spoilers…
OTOH, I know there is some other drama going on around Hydra only because r/battlebots items that make it to my front page start with “I know a lot of people here are hating on Hydra but…”
Example:
So it’s all getting tuned out at the moment.
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I think we would get along, God speed sir!
Watched the video about the complainers. Pretty funny. I especially like the race car noises as his cat zooms around his garage in the time-lapse video.
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How the heck do you post this and not mention how much he’s asking for it?!
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I love the idea of battlebots a lot, but there’s a fundamental problem with how victory is determined.
when the model battleship people https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_warship_combat
have their contests, there are built-in weak spots for the opponants to target. When the boat sinks, there is a winner.
Battlebots need to have corresponding targets to register a win, that doesn’t destroy the whole damn model. Otherwise we might as well be watching a full scale demolition derby with people inside the machines.
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Pretty sure that is the point and why people like watching it. It’s demolition derby for nerds.
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I suppose you can optimize a sport for spectators, or you can optimize a sport for competitors. Battlebots is clearly a spectator oriented sport, and rc warships is a participation game.
I would disagree there. It is a competition where the stakes are in large part whether or not your device gets destroyed. That’s part of what makes it exciting for the competitors as well as the audience. It’s gladiator combat without the cruelty.
This. I’d had a dim view of demolition derby as a concept, but throw a race/goal mechanic in and you’ve got figure 8 races which are conceptually similar but (IMHO) vastly more entertaining to watch.
I can’t help but think Battlebots is going to be a hell of a lot more entertaining once Boston Dynamics gets into the ring. Or just follow the Robot Pro-Wrestling folks in Japan 
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Absolutely! Our equivalent, Robot Wars, pretty much encouraged wanton destruction, but more than that, it encouraged creativity, and mechanical Darwinism. Some machines looked invulnerable, and were pretty much reduced to scrap within minutes, while sometimes the most unlikely, flimsy-looking machines were astonishingly durable, and could cause real upsets against machines thought previously invulnerable.
There were one or two that were just so well designed and engineered from the get-go that anyone who put a robot in the arena against them you just knew would be leaving with their pride and joy in a trash can. And the drive to go away, look at how they failed, and come back better and stronger. And they mostly did.
And we viewers just loved the mayhem.
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I think the opposite. That’ll be like a classically trained Karate display athlete getting into an MMA ring. He’d get knocked out in 8 seconds with one of those highly practical Brazilian grappling moves.
Battle Bots is the MMA of robots. The winners are extremely simple with reliable mechanisms and a good grasp of physics. You don’t win with fancy limbs and flashy flame throwers. You win with sticky wheels, lots of mass, and a little wedge that drives under your opponent, pushing them helplessly into the wall. A Boston Dynamics robot would get their plastic butt handed to them in 8 seconds.
Interestingly, Battle Bots has the same problem as MMA- few styles are universally effective and thus every fight is the same. Every MMA match ends up with both fighters grappled motionlesss on the ground until we find out who has better cardio.
Battle Bots has the same flaw- the pushers and flippers are so dominant that none of the “cool” stuff people imagine actually works. It’s all about how to defend against pushers and flippers, or how to build a better pusher/flipper.
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