Human ingenuity is just holding its own against AI-designed machines in
Sodarace (http://sodarace.net/index.jsp), a joint offering of Soda (http://soda.co.uk/) and Queen Mary College, University of London (http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/).

Sodarace is "the online olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning in a competition to design robots that race over 2D terrains using the Sodaconstructor virtual construction kit (http://www.sodaplay.com/constructor/)."

It seems that - to date - humanity has just about got the edge in this entertaining educational project. Dr Peter McOwan of Queen Mary affirms: "Human creativity will be tough to beat and this will be a fascinating global experiment. Machines designing machines has been the theme of many popular science fiction movies, but in Sodarace that has become a reality."

Chillingly, it was touch-and-go for a while on the rubble-strewn human/AI battlefield. Computer-generated offerings from the UK and Austria started strongly, and were eventually subdued only by a Canadian contender developed by good old trial-and-error.

The news that we've still got it in the creative thinking department comes as a great relief to all Reg hacks who have for some time believed that the forthcoming Vulture Central implementation of the Bricolage CMS would also involve the activation of a Content Generation System programmed to turn out 50 IT-related stories a day, ten funnies and one non-IT-related human-interest piece. Mercifully, Sodarace (http://sodarace.net/index.jsp) proves that we are still some way off the nightmare of the relentless and tireless cyberjourno. ®