Also: did they say why a half-marathon? Winning a marathon answers a question; winning a half-marathon brings to mind a followup question…
Battery charge. Even lithium ion only goes so far, and anything like a gasoline-powered generator would add too much weight.
It’s got worse form than Zatopek.
That one was autonomous. There was another controlled robot that finished about two minutes ahead of it, but because of the scoring (and penalty for not using an autonomous bot), the autonomous Honor robot won the half-marathon.
“Half-marathon” is the standard term for a 13.1 mile foot race. The complete race being half the length of a standard full marathon.
Any objections should be addressed to TPTB of the track & field world.
Yes, I know. My point is, it’s like unto the old joke about the proud dad who says this baby could someday grow up to be Vice-President — which stops there, with no further punchline, because people hearing it already realize the guy settled for something less impressive instead of saying the one term that immediately comes to mind.
China uses over 50% of the world’s coal to produce electricity.
Gotcha. I thought your point was “but who won the second half of the marathon?”
Thanks for setting me straight.
The relevant question here is not “where are you currently standing” but “in which direction are you moving and at what speed.”
If general purpose wheeled robots that are genuinely useful get deployed on a vast scale, I think that’ll be a good thing, because that will provide the economic incentive to make the human-built world more accessible to them. Think: a lot more ramps. And the wheelchair users that are only grudgingly accommodated these days will benefit from that too. Kind of like how celiac sufferers are very glad the fad for gluten-free products took off.
In fact, now I’m remembering that was the plot of a sci-fi story where a robot inventor deliberately left their creations wheeled rather than working on legs. They never said why, but the punchline at the end showed a wheelchair user happily using a ramp that had been constructed for the robots. I can’t remember the name of the story. Paging @Andy_L … 
Every time I see a half-marathon “13.1” sticker on a car, I think “Meh. Call me when you run a marathon.”
Or at least I did think that, until I ran my first half-marathon last February. Now I think half-marathoner’s are all the best sort of people. The very finest. And so it always shall be (until I run a full marathon this coming February, then it’ll be back to “Meh. Call me when you run a marathon).
Is the thread title bugging anybody else? A robot winning a half-marathon with only robot competitors isn’t exactly a surprise.
There were humans running at the same time, but separated.
Yeah, its not the a bipedal humanoid is an efficient machine in a completely neutral context, it’s that (notionally), it could be a useful multipurpose thing in the human-built world where things are already significantly made to fit humans.
I’m reminded of the Segway - remember that? When it came out, its inventor claimed that it was such an amazing invention that people would be redesigning entire cities around it. And maybe he was right. The thing is, they would have HAD to redesign cities for it, because it wasn’t really compatible with existing cities, which is why it flopped.
You build your machine for the world you have, not the world you want.
The owner of Segway also flopped.
On the morning of 26 September 2010, Heselden was riding his Segway while walking his dog near Thorp Arch; when he reversed the Segway to allow a dog walker to get past him, he fell from a nearby cliff into the River Wharfe.[8][9][10] A “rugged country version” of a Segway was found in the water.[6][11] The coroner concluded that Heselden had died of “multiple blunt force injuries of the chest and spine consistent with a fall whilst riding a gyrobike”
Dead while reversing his segway in rough/hilly terrain. An unlucky man who didn’t quite make the grade, eh?
Maybe it was user error. Maybe it was an electronic problem. I’m thinking specifically of a faulty (Albert) Hall Effect Sensor
…I was thinking of A Day in the Life.
As was I 