Rock, Scissors, Paper, Shoot: Robot Wins 100 Percent of the Time
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Chess. Jeopardy! Now Janken…Machines are beating humans at more and more games.
The latest version of a robot developed by University of Tokyo researchers uses high-speed recognition to react incredibly fast to the movements of a human hand that is forming the shape of either a rock, scissors or paper. In a thousandth of a second the robot recognizes what the human hand is doing and then chooses the winning move.
This development will not only impact aspiring human janken world champions. It represents an advance in a human-machine cooperative systems. Instead of predicting what a human might do, the computer is recognizing what a human is doing.
This technology could help humans avoid accidents as well as make some intricate plays on the stock market. Sethu Vijayakumar, professor of robotics at Edinburgh University, told the BBC, to advance in these areas “we need to combine high-speed reaction with high-speed prediction, using game theory and behaviour patterning.”
Watch the robot in action here: