And Finally... Even Britain's robots can't win the World Cup
Edinferno, a team from Edinburgh University, was eliminated in the group stages of its competition at RoboCup 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey, without scoring a single goal.
All the robots in the various RoboCup competitions are autonomous, meaning they are not directly controlled by people, rather they rely purely on their own programming to play the game.
Edinferno are the first British team to take part in the event, which has been held annually since 1997. They were playing in the Standard Platform competition, which uses identical robots, but each team programs them individually.
The competition's ultimate aim is to develop a robot team that could beat the human World Cup holders of the time before 2050.
The Edinferno coach, Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy, vowed to bring a stronger side to next year's competition, which will be held in Mexico City.
"Almost all the bugs that stopped us were because we were not match ready," he said, demonstrating that match fitness is as big an issue in robot sports as human ones.
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Tony White
Britain's humans couldn't win a World Cup either, as each of the four countries that make up the UK have their own team. This would technically be the Scottish robot team, in which case the biggest surprise is that they qualified for the tournament at all.
Good point well made! I suppose I showed a little but of the Andy Murray factor, regarding Scots as playing for Britain because there is no English representative.