Robot Bingo: Fact Or (Science) Fiction?

The bingo lover that I am, and also, the science fiction lover that I am, I decided to find out if there is such a thing as Robot Bingo.

Robot Bingo, yes you heard me. Sound too good to be true? Maybe so. For someone like myself, in the age of the World Wide Web, one needs only type in "robot bingo" into any online search engine and see what comes up.

So I ran "robot bingo" up the Internet flag pole to see if any web pages saluted. I didn't know what to expect. Perhaps high-tech Japanese robots (a la Lost In Translation) calling numbers and yelling "bingo"? Futuristic robot bingo halls with robot bingo spotters and robot arms to daub your bingo cards?

What I got was a brief clip of tiny robots (designed and constructed by students from universities in Tokyo, Nagano and other regions in Japan) taking part in something called a "bingo battle", which sadly bears no resemblance to the game of bingo I know and love. Instead, I watched in mild curiosity and slight disappointment as the robots grabbed tiny coloured discs and dropped them into slots.

Does Japan have a different kind of bingo that we're not aware of? Perhaps. But for now, the 75, 80, and 90 ball bingo games we are all familiar with do not yet exist in the realm of robotics. Perhaps they will some day.