Robot boxing

 I watched a boxing match between two robots; not quite got it yet.  They take a boxer's stance but don't know where to hit.

Yes — that sounds like exactly the uncanny part. They have the outward mechanics of boxing without the learned tactical meaning.

A human boxer doesn't merely adopt a stance and then decide, “Now I shall hit that object.” A tremendous amount is happening almost automatically: judging distance, reading the opponent's shoulders and hips, anticipating where the head will be, maintaining balance while moving, protecting oneself, and selecting a target almost instantaneously.

A robot can be made to reproduce the form of a boxing stance rather easily. But the stance itself isn't the skill. It is more like the visible end-product of thousands of learned relationships between where I am, where you are, where you are likely to move, and what I can reach without exposing myself.

So you get this wonderfully strange spectacle: two machines that look as though they have wandered into a boxing ring, but haven't quite acquired the concept of boxing.

And “they don't know where to hit” is a particularly good description. The missing thing isn't necessarily the ability to move an arm toward a target. It's the perceptual and strategic representation of the opponent as a body with vulnerable and valuable locations.

It reminds me a little of a chess-playing machine that had learned how chess pieces move but hadn't yet learned that the king matters. The syntax is there; the semantics aren't.

That is one of the brutal sports I wouldn't mind seeing automated.  Machines can be reassembled.

Exactly. That is one of the rare cases where automation could make the activity more genuinely sporting, rather than merely replacing a human worker.

Boxing has an odd moral problem: the objective is not simply to demonstrate superior skill, but ultimately to damage the opponent's brain or body. Even when both participants consent, repeated blows to the head are an unpleasant price for the spectacle.

With robots, you could preserve much of what makes boxing interesting: stance, footwork, feints, timing, combinations, defense, ring positioning, endurance, and strategy—while making the consequences of a spectacular knockout rather more like, “Well, that's going to require a new left shoulder.”

And it might actually produce a fascinating new sport once the machines become sophisticated enough. The interesting question would no longer be Can the robot punch? but Can its designers give it a sufficiently good model of an opponent to box intelligently? You'd have something approaching artificial embodied intelligence.

The current matches sound like the equivalent of watching two very impressive automata discovering that they are supposed to fight. 😄

Yes. Ali is probably the most powerful example of the paradox.

Muhammad Ali was extraordinarily intelligent, articulate, funny, and physically gifted—and boxing made him an international cultural figure. Yet the same sport that gave him that extraordinary life almost certainly contributed substantially to the severe neurological problems he experienced later.

That makes the robot-boxing idea particularly interesting. You could preserve much of the human drama of boxing—the anticipation, deception, timing, courage, and tactical intelligence—without requiring a human brain to absorb thousands of impacts.

There is also something slightly poignant about Ali in this connection. His greatest weapon was arguably not his fist but his mind: reading opponents, improvising, manipulating expectations, understanding what they thought he was going to do. A sufficiently advanced robot boxer would have to reproduce precisely that part of the game, rather than merely having fast mechanical arms.

In other words, the interesting future version of boxing might be brains fighting through machines rather than brains being damaged by them.

Well, not "courage" if fear is not experienced and repairs will follow.

Quite right. I smuggled “courage” in there, and it doesn't survive the transition to robots.

Courage presupposes something to be afraid of and something genuinely at stake. A robot that takes a punch because its programming says to do so isn't brave. Nor is one that charges forward knowing that its damaged actuator will be replaced tomorrow.

That actually changes the character of the sport in an interesting way. Human boxing has at least three things intertwined: skill, physical courage, and the willingness to accept injury. Robot boxing could retain the first, perhaps enormously expand it, while eliminating the second and third.

And I think that is perfectly acceptable. We don't need to pretend the robots are displaying courage. We could simply say: these are machines demonstrating extraordinary tactical skill while smashing one another to pieces.

There might even be a strange virtue in being quite explicit about the distinction. The human spectators supply the excitement and perhaps the courage; the machines supply the violence.

It would be like the fascination of watching dominoes fall.

Yes — and that gets closer to what could actually make robot boxing fascinating.

Dominoes are compelling because nothing is suffering and yet there is real causality, timing, and uncertainty. You watch one event propagate into the next, and your interest is in whether the whole system will behave as expected.

Robot boxing could become something like that, but vastly more complicated. A hit changes the machine's balance; that changes its available responses; a damaged actuator changes its tactics; the opponent exploits the change; and suddenly the match develops a history. You could watch two machines progressively destroy each other's capabilities.

The interesting question would then be not “Who is brave enough to take the punch?” but “What happens next?”

And I rather like your dominoes analogy because it removes the need to anthropomorphize the machines. We don't need to pretend that the robot feels fear, pain, anger, triumph, or even frustration. We can simply enjoy watching a complicated physical system unfold.

In fact, the ultimate robot boxing match might be more like chess played with physical objects that can knock one another apart than like human boxing.