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Robot Wars
1998 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Marc Thorpe
Teams of amateur robot fighting enthusiasts battle it out over a series of rounds in a huge purpose-built arena aiming to become the Robot Wars Champion.
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4 comments on Hacker News
Reminds me of the UK TV show Robot Wars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Wars_(TV_series)
Building a game with my dad when I was ~9-10 is a fond memory of mine, and how I got an interest in coding. I was really into my N64 but wanted to make my own game for it around the hit British TV show "Robot Wars". Of course we didn't actually make an N64 game or even anything close to resembling what my childhood imagination had cooked up in my mind, but I learnt most of the basics of functional coding and had lots of fun with my dad, and was really proud of the insanely simple games we made.
ELIZA is, or at least was, actually used as a therapeutic tool: people would spend hours over a terminal, 'talking' to it. It worked because ELIZA wasn't a human and wasn't judgemental --- there was nobody actually there. And ELIZA is possibly the least convincing chatbot of all time.
So I can totally see how removing humans from the loop in certain jobs could be really successful. You mention doctors: I totally want AI doctors, which aren't going to get tired, aren't going to dismiss me as a hypochondriac, aren't going to skip routine tests because they're certain what's wrong with me, and above all, reduce the load on the human doctors so they get to concentrate on stuff the AI can't handle.
As for sport... well, actually, I don't want to do any of the things you mention, because I'm weird, but if you watch an episode of _Robot Wars_ you'll see people do exactly those things over what amount to a bunch of radio controlled cars.
build a killer robot for the tv show robot wars and make children cry as their robots get obliterated