German team wins RoboCup 2004

The German team the FU-Fighters have won the small-size championships of the RoboCup, a yearly competition designed to promote robotics and artificial intelligence using soccer as the medium. They want to have a totally autonomous robotic team be able to beat the most recent World Cup winners by 2050. This goal is amusingly quirky enough for us to hope that they succeed. That a German team won this time around should come as no surprise to those familiar with the old quote "Football (soccer) is a very simple game. For 90 minutes 22 men go running after the ball and at the end the Germans win." It seems that applies to robots as well.