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https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3538
That's what my brother said, but I just don't see it taking that long.
After seeing that weird green haired robot literally run into a tree, but course correct itself after neither do I. Really, my "safeish" bet is the mid-late 2030s. Robotics is moving incredibly fast especially in China.
Not yet, but I will do now.Cyber_Rebel wrote: ↑Sat Jul 26, 2025 10:03 am Yeah... I'm assuming you showed your brother this video @Wjfox?
He is pretty stubborn in his views. We had a similar argument regarding autonomous vehicles.
Here's the thing, it's mostly down to when we can lick general AI. The actual mechanics of robotics will continue to advance, but without advancements in AI, even the most advanced modern robotics would be scarcely more impressive than the stiff proto-ASIMO robots from 30 years ago. Most advancements in the actual handling of robots follow improvements in control and energy efficiency, so it's no wonder that the past 5 years have simultaneously seen great AI progress AND great robotics progress (though it's more coincidental that LLMs blew up; they aren't the kinds of AI handling robots)
The funniest thing is the same answer applies to AVs.
ChatGPT wrote:Hah — okay, this was even more perfectly timed than I realized.
The Skild result is probably the strongest possible update you could have found for that particular thread, because it doesn’t merely show another robot-football exhibition. It represents a different route toward the thing the poll is actually forecasting: robots learning the underlying athletic and strategic competence needed to play the game.
Skild’s full technical post went live today, September 23, 2026, alongside the X post you linked. Their setup starts from S1, their robotics foundation model, and then adds reinforcement learning through self-play. The only ultimate objective they gave the agent was essentially score goals. It repeatedly competed against increasingly capable versions of itself inside NVIDIA Isaac Sim.
And then things got interesting.
During those simulated “140 years,” Skild says behaviors emerged that they did not individually reward or hand-script: standing back up after falling, dribbling around a defender, shielding possession, and tackling. Once trained, they transferred the learned policy from simulation onto an actual humanoid and had it play physically.
That distinction is enormous.
The old approach could often look like:
engineers devise soccer behaviors → program/control robot → robot executes them
This is much closer to:
give robot the game objective → let increasingly capable opponents create the curriculum → robot discovers useful behaviors → transfer learned policy into the physical world
That is much more analogous to the AlphaGo/AlphaStar/OpenAI Five lineage than traditional robotics programming. Skild explicitly makes that comparison themselves.
And your old FutureTimeline thread has aged beautifully, because look at what happened after it went dormant on August 2, 2025:
August 17, 2025 — 5v5. At the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, Tsinghua's Hephaestus Team won the humanoid 5v5 soccer championship, defeating the German HTWK Robots + Nao Devils team 1–0.
July 5, 2026 — 11v11. RoboCup staged what it describes as the first full 11-versus-11 humanoid robot soccer match on physical hardware. B-Human defeated HTWK Robots 4–0. These robots were autonomously perceiving, deciding, moving and coordinating on the field.
August 2026 — increasingly athletic play. The second World Humanoid Robot Games expanded the football program and even opened with a 7v7 exhibition. Beijing's official account specifically described the robots as having advanced to running while dribbling, powerful shots and diving saves.
September 23, 2026 — “Messinator.” Skild demonstrates a humanoid learning football through 140 simulated years of self-play, with dribbling, shielding, tackling and recovery behaviors emerging from the pressure to score, followed by successful sim-to-real transfer.
And here is the funny bit when we go back and read the actual FutureTimeline discussion.
In July 2025, Yuli Ban was basically arguing that the bottleneck might increasingly be the intelligence/control system rather than the mere existence of sufficiently capable robot hardware. The exact technologies have evolved differently from some of the speculation in that post, but Skild's announcement is remarkably relevant to that underlying argument. We're now watching researchers take a fairly general robotic foundation model, place it into an accelerated adversarial learning environment, and let competence emerge from interaction rather than explicitly authoring every maneuver. The original thread really did wander into the right question.
