Does the future of boxing lie in humans versus robots? Possibly

Boxing: thinking outside

From time to time, the sport of boxing changes its rules. But for the most part, it still requires that each participant in a match be both human and alive. (Exceptions do occasionally pop up – kangaroos are the heavyweight exemplars.)

Joseph Lee at Flinders University in Australia has explored a way to expand boxing’s rigid traditions. He outlines his thinking in a study in the journal Ethics and Philosophy called “Thinking outside the ring of concussive punches: Reimagining boxing“.

Lee performs a thought experiment. He “imagines a fight between a human and a robot”. This imagining produces, he writes, a realisation.

“A demand for robot-human boxing may occur or not. Certainly, the supply of robot boxing opponents is theoretically achievable,” he writes. “With the right programming, a contest against a future machine can be as daring as [a matador] facing up against a bull.”

The main benefit, he says, is obvious: “The essential elements of boxing would be retained for humans, accompanied by an overall decrease in boxing-related brain injuries when the number of live opponents is reduced.”

Classified walls

Taxonomists work to classify things, to build conceptual walls that separate each variety of something from all the other varieties of that thing. There exists a taxonomy of snakes, of melons, of viruses, of distortion-oriented presentation techniques – of almost any variegated kind of object or concept. There is even a taxonomy of taxonomists.

Feedback learns, thanks to reader Dave Brooks, that there is a taxonomy of stone walls, outlined in “Taxonomy and nomenclature for the stone domain in New England“.

Are there good taxonomies of stone walls in other places? Feedback would enjoy knowing.

Economics of surfing

What is the value of surfing, if you express it as money?

Surfing is a “more frequent and intense activity” than merely visiting a national park and therefore is “likely to have greater effects on per capita mental health gains and economic value”, say Ralf Buckley at Griffith University in Australia and Mary-Ann Cooper at Andrés Bello University in Chile.

They try to calculate that economic value in a study published in the journal npj Ocean Sustainability.

The pair reckon that the value of stress reduction via surfing is “estimated at ~$5000 [US] per person per year”. They further reckon that for the nation of Australia, this amounts to about $1 billion to $3.3 billion per year.

Of their endeavour, Buckley and Cooper say: “This appears to be a novel approach, distinct from previous research.” No one, so far, has risen to contradict that.

Car jeers and cheers

Some researchers are strongly anti-car. Others, perhaps fewer in number, are anti-anti-car.

The thrilling horror sometimes caused by cars – billions of people careening towards possible injury and even death – drove Patrick Miner at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues. Drove them, that is, to amass a report in the Journal of Transport Geography called “Car harm: A global review of automobility’s harm to people and the environment“.

How many billions of people are affected? Since the year 2000, they say, “an estimated 2 billion people have been injured in motor vehicle crashes – up to 1 in 4 people alive today – not accounting for repeat injuries or population change”. And that’s not to mention the other kinds of problems they list, such as social inequities and damaged ecosystems.

Meanwhile – well, not exactly meanwhile, but rather 17 years ago – Roger Roots, a graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, tried to apply the brakes to that truckload/lorryload of worries.

In his perhaps pre-emptive report called “The dangers of automobile travel: A reconsideration”, published in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Roots rode roughshod over the purported problems. The dangers of automobile use “are substantially lower than the dangers posed by early horse-driven and steam-driven transportation methods, especially in terms of fatalities per mile”, he wrote.

Roots went on to found Lysander Spooner University in Montana, an institution that, though little known (it is unclear whether the university has any students), modestly boasts that it is “dedicated to truth and free inquiry, and to educating the politically and socially estranged. We are low cost and high quality. The world’s first truly antigovernment university.” Of all the world’s universities, it may be the most fervently driven to theory.

Dead ant repellant

Visits to a cemetery may occasion a lively conversation for entomologists and exterminators who read a recent study by Thomas Wagner and Tomer Czaczkes at the University of Regensburg, Germany. The study in question is called “Corpse-associated odours elicit avoidance in invasive ants“.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com.

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