Tag Archives: Athletics, Track & Field

Beijing’s robot half-marathon is back for its second year with far less embarassing results

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To make up for an incredibly laughable inaugural event, Beijing is running back its humanoid robot half-marathon. Fortunately, the event that pits humanoid robots made by Chinese companies against each other across 13 miles went a lot smoother this year.

This year's half-marathon hosted more than 100 competitors, with first place going to Honor, better known for its smartphones, and its red-clad robot named Lightning. Living up to the name, the gold medalist finished the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That's several minutes faster than the human record that was recently set by Uganda's Jacob Kiplimo last month.

Honor swept the other podium spots, with the important caveat that they all navigated the course autonomously, according to the state-sponsored television news agency CCTV. That's a massive improvement over last year, where the fastest time among 21 robots was achieved by Tiangong Ultra with a record of two hours and 40 minutes. Last year's event saw many of the bipedal robots receiving assistance from human operators who ran alongside them, as well as some comical mishaps, like falling at the starting line.

However, the BBC reported that around 40 percent of the robots competed autonomously this year, while the rest were remote-controlled. Despite the rapid improvements, this year's event still had its fair share of crashes, even from Honor's robots.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/beijings-robot-half-marathon-is-back-for-its-second-year-with-far-less-embarassing-results-191308396.html?src=rss

Bungie’s Marathon will arrive in March

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Bungie’s Marathon has a new release window. The survival extraction shooter was originally set to hit PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC in September, but by June, Sony had delayed it indefinitely. Now, with a plagiarism issue largely in the rearview mirror, Bungie has confirmed that Marathon will arrive in March and and plans to sell it for $40.

Alongside the release date and price announcement, Bungie released a 23-minute video that takes a deep dive into the game and shows off the current state of Marathon. New features include proximity chat and a solo mode, while Bungie says it has upgraded the environmental storytelling and visual fidelity. Gritty environments provide a nice contrast to the glossy sci-fi sheen that defined Marathon’s visual language in our earliest looks at the game.

There’s a lot more on deck for Marathon’s first year including new maps and events. Bungie also plans to release more shells, which are akin to character classes that can be customized by changing your loadout. The Rook shell, for instance, is a new one that the studio has added since the alpha playtests. This shell allows you to join a run that's already in progress. You’ll have a limited loadout, but you’re not really risking anything valuable as you run around to loot items.

There’s a lot riding on Marathon. Parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment said last month that Destiny 2 had not lived up to its expectations and it wrote down the value of Bungie’s assets by $204 million. Back in August, Sony asserted more control over Bungie and said the developer was “shifting into a role that is becoming more part of PlayStation Studios.”

That’s hardly the only issue Bungie has faced this year. The studio admitted in May that one of its former employees plagiarized the work of artist Fern Hook by enabling it to be used in Marathon’s in-game textures. Earlier this month, Hook said that Bungie and Sony had resolved the matter “to my satisfaction.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/bungies-marathon-will-arrive-in-march-200838426.html?src=rss