The link [1] then shows us that this person most certainly is on top of their game :) Beautiful write-up and video, and amazing project. Thanks for sharing.

[1] https://github.com/misprit7/computerraria

Are there always three players in the goalie position? I seem to remember playing with one goalie (1-2-5-3 players), but that’s a while ago.

But can the robot shit talk? As a fellow lover of foosball I find that shit talking is ingrained in the culture as demoralizing an opponent (see Community) is a big part of winning at the highest level and should be the next step. I think a committed foosball player might end up creating the first true AGI just for proper shit talking.

Foosball is a tabletop game without general cultural respect (like table tennis does as an olympic sport) or chess, but while robots can easily beat me at chess these days it looks like I'd still be able to beat a state of the art robot foosball table.

The video is very intentionally funny (in a dry way) across the board but owning your younger brother as part of it is hilarious and he was a good sport.

Is this guys a well known YouTuber or something? He seemed shockingly successful at getting companies to send him really high quality components.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXPiqk0-zDY

I'm kind of curious if you could track the ball with two wide angle cameras embedded in each axis of the table. I guess the players could obscure the ball doing that. Although I guess the players are raised a bit from the table, so might work?

I did wonder also if some kind of RF tracking could be used by embedding an RFID tag or similar in the ball.

Also, this whole thing sounds like a competitor to Stuff Made Here. In a sense this is what Youtube was invented for. Congrats.

Then the rules. So many different rules. French rules are probably the weirdest where "pissette" ain't allowed in casual pub games but is allowed in official games.

As a sidenote in a science museum I got to play some foosball vs a robotic arm (which may be of interest to TFA's author) but the robot was cheating in that it could rotate the player to any angle FFS! That was quite cheesy. A little girl can be seen playing it here (8th pic in the slideshow):

http://science-center.lu/fr/explorations

The curved corners in a traditional table are of course necessary to avoid the ball being dead in the corners. With three players you don't need a curved corner and can still always get the ball.

Here is a video of the ITSF world cup, where you can see that there is just a single goalie on every side: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3vnrAIOWDwo&pp=ygUOaXRzZiB3b3J...

There is actually a quite interesting documentary out there which tells the rise and fall of foosball in the US which is tightly coupled with the company behind the Tornado tables if I remember correctly. I saw it on Youtube a while a ago, but could not find it now. Might have been "Foosballers" but I am nit sure.

At least the official table of the International Table Soccer Federation only has one goalie, and raised corners.

https://www.tablesoccer.org/tables/leonhart.php

Now I need to quickly climb out of this rabbit hole before I start to dig into the 41 page rule book. https://www.tablesoccer.org/rules/documents/Standard_Matchpl...