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Battlefield Robots and Other Delights, Part 1

© Dane Mitchell Donato

Those who happen to be truly paranoid and also happen to subscribe to theidea of robots being the eventual cause of the end of the human race willmost definitely not enjoy Comedy Central's cable program "Battlebots."

For the rest of us, though, I'd highly recommend it. If you haven't seen the show, check out the site at http://www.battlebots.com. Briefly, the show is taped in an old warehouse who's interior has been transformed into an arena of sorts. Radio controlled robots with colorful names like "Vlad The Impaler," (my favorite), "Mechadon" (which looks rather like a huge steel spider with razor legs), and "Backlash" (a creation that reminds me very much of a gigantic food processing blade on wheels) rush around, trying their best to disable or destroy the enemy and thereby move on to the next bout, with the last robot standing being the eventual winner.

These things are quick and tough, and have a variety of offensive and defensive weapons, including circular saw blades, spikes, rock and sledge hammers, and fortified armored shells.

The show is a lot of fun, and no one, if you don't count the robots themselves (and it can be surprisingly difficult watching a favorite robot being pummeled), gets hurt. Certainly, you can argue that this sport is much more humane than professional boxing or bull fighting; here, the only thing that gets hurt is the loser's ego. That, we hope, will heal with time.

Battlebots isn't a new phenomena, and, as far as I can tell, dates back to at least 1994 with a competition called Robot Wars. Their website is at http://www.robotwars.com. It looks to me like this sport will be around for a while.

As fun as watching the mayhem small steel boxes on wheels can commit on each other (what you might want to think of as demolition derby for technogeeks), what is really interesting to me is how these little robots remind me of the possibility of future wars being executed by mechanical proxy.

This idea, I imagine, probably goes back to the days of the ancient war machines, the trebuchets and ballistas and catapults. Joe Haldeman has explored this idea well in his novel "The Forever Peace."

Machines are of course an extension of ourselves, and in some ways, are far better -- faster, certainly, and stronger. Computers, an integral part of machine architecture, are getting faster and more powerful even as they move into

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