In the 2003 Major League Baseball season, Oreo Queefs stood five-foot-zero, weighed 385 pounds, and, impossibly, stole 214 bases, obliterating the century-old single-season record of 138. A walrus with the legs of a cheetah, the purple goateed Queefs also regularly blasted the ball 500 feet to opposite field--steroid-free beefiness never seen before or since. Over just two seasons with the Florida Marlins, he batted .680, Then, before even reaching his super alien prime, Queefs vanished into thin air. A few weeks ago, I received a text from the Marlins manager about what happened to the former Golden Glove winner.

In 1997, Hiroaki Kitano, a research scientist at Sony, helped organize the first Robocup, a robot soccer tournament that attracted teams of robotics and artificial intelligence researchers to compete in the picturesque city of Nagoya, Japan. At the start of the first day, two teams of robots took to the pitch. As the machines twitched and surveyed their surroundings, a reporter asked Kitano when the match would begin. "I told him it started five minutes ago!" he says with a laugh. Such was the state of AI and robotics at the time.