Soccer robots take a dive

THE quest to make robots ever more human-like blunders onwards. Soccer-playing robots are to be taught how to fall properly, to stop them from sustaining career-threatening injuries when they topple over (see “Soccerbots learn to take a dive”). That’s good news for bots, but maybe not such good news for robot soccer. You can’t help wondering whether this year’s RoboCup will see an outbreak of “simulation” – soccerbots deliberately falling over to gain an unfair advantage. If so, that would be another human attribute mastered: cheating.