Mighty ROBOT achieves total SUPREMACY over feeble humans
At rock-paper-scissors, today. Tomorrow ...
No matter how many John-Wayne-inspired moments you've had in front of the mirror, you're not as quick on the draw as the Janken robot.
Ishikawa Oku Laboratory in Tokyo has built the android to have a perfect score at rock-paper-scissors, identifying which way its human opponent is going to go in one millisecond.
The boffins built the bot with super-high-speed vision, i.e. a camera, which looks at the angle of the wrist to tell what the person is going to come up with in the game. The robot looks like it's putting up its rock, paper or scissors at the same time as the person, but that's because it's super-fast.
Think it's a nasty little cheater? Well, it is somewhat, but the scientists reckon that the experiment proves that robots and humans can cooperate without a time delay, a technology which could for example help people with limited motion. ®