UK Robot Football Tournament
     The first UK Robot Football Championship took place at the University of Warwick, Coventry April 5-6. The University of Plymouth's squad played the University of Warwick Team Evolution, which recently developed a rival robot team with new tactics and technology and will compete in competitions governed by the Federation of International Robot-soccer Association (FIRA). The FIRA European Robot-Soccer Championships 2004 will take place June 15-18 in Munich, Germany with 14 teams from 11 countries, including France,

Germany, Italy and Spain. The 2004 FIRA Robot World Cup will be held in Korea, October 27-31, 2004, with over 110 robot soccer teams from 23 countries competing. The robots demonstrate the progress in intelligent systems by building teams of robots capable of high-level cooperation in real-time situation. Dr Ken Young, Engineering Department, University of Warwick, said: Researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics set the challenge of developing a team of football-playing robots capable of beating humans by 2050. There's still a long way to go before the world's footballing robots are up to the 2050 challenge, but tournaments promote autonomous robot development and facilitate ideas exchange to further the robotics industry.
     Two teams of five 7.5 cm cubic robots play with an orange ball on an internationally specified pitch, and attempt to score as many goals as possible during two five-minute halves. Pitch marks and ruling match up to those of conventional soccer. A referee watches over the game. Fixed cable connections, fouls and owner's intervention during the play are prohibited.
www.newsandevents.warwick.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=press release&id=1757 or www.fira.net/index.html?PHPS ESSID=0d6e33d2fa2ed3 c1f058 562cd9dd8d8d or www.warwick.ac.uk/

Music - in the Ear of the Beholder or in the Algorithms of the Brain?
     Why do we like or dislike a song? Polyphonic HMI, (www.polyphonichmi.com) has developed proprietary music analysis technology that can determine music preferences of a single user or the current music market. The technology, called Hit Song Science, identifies similarities between successfully released music and unreleased or unsigned music, and can use the data to identify emerging trends in the marketplace. It considers parameters related to the commercial success of the music such as total sales, highest chart position, date of release and others. The product is designed to identify the consistent and related mathematical patterns of hit songs using a proprietary algorithm to weigh and analyze more than 20 components of a recording (brightness, tempo, rhythm, cadence, etc.) and assign each song a value. The human ear finds patterns in music appealing, therefore historical data can be studied with clusters of information appearing over time. They use artificial intelligence applications along with other methods to evaluate the underlying mathematical patterns in music. Through spectral deconvolution, isolating and separating musical events in a song, they focus on patterns in melody, harmony, chord progression, brilliance, fullness of sound,