Known as the 'Garlic Girls,' the South Korean women's curling team brought much attention to the sport.<br />Now, Korean researchers have developed robots that are able to play a curling match against human opponents.<br />Park Se-young has more. <br /> A curling stone slides on the ice and knocks the opposition's stone from the target circle.<br />The stone was thrown by Curly, a pair of artificial-intelligence-driven robots.<br />The skip robot acts as the captain and formulates strategies after inspecting the game situation with its camera.<br />It sends the information to the pitcher robot, which pushes the stone towards the target.<br />Just like AlphaGo, Curly studied thousands of deliveries from curling matches.<br /><br /> "Using deep learning based on 160-thousand deliveries from more than 13-hundred curling matches, the robots can control the direction, speed and rotation of the delivery."<br /><br /> The robots also learned to take into account the stadium's temperature and humidity, which affect the ice.<br />And for the first time ever, the machines faced human players in a curling game... but fell to a 3-nil defeat.<br /><br /> "The curling robots formulated strategies pretty well, but failed to adjust to variables of the ice."<br /><br /> The AI robots will be used for developing strategies and providing training support.<br />Park Se-young, Arirang News. <br />
