Japanese scientists have created a robot hand that will beat you at Rock Paper Scissors every single time.
You may be pretty good at Rock Paper Scissors. Heck, you may be the Johnny Ringo of Rock Paper Scissors. But allow me to introduce you to the Doc Holliday of Rock Paper Scissors: a Japanese robot hand with a 100 percent winning record. The machine does not lose. The machine cannot lose.
The secret isn’t techno-psychic insight, it’s sheer speed. The robot has a camera that can recognize the shape of a human hand within one millisecond and then respond almost as quickly. It happens so fast that it appears simultaneous, but the machine is actually waiting for the human to throw before it does a thing.
The robot was developed as an example of “human-machine cooperation systems,” according to the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory. “This technology is one example that show a possibility of cooperation control within a few miliseconds. And this technology can be applied to motion support of human beings and cooperation work between human beings and robots etc. without time delay.”
“A human being recognizes external environment by using many kinds of sensory information. By integrating these information and making up lack of information for each other, a more reliable and multilateral recognition can be achieved,” the laboratory explained. (It’s Japanese, remember.) “The purpose of Sensor Fusion Project is to realize new sensing architecture by integrating multi-sensor information and to develop hierarchical and decentralized architecture for recognizing human beings further. As a result, more reliable and multilateral information can be extracted, which can realize high level recognition mechanism.”
Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’m sure the long-term potential of this technology could have tremendous impact on the future of human-machine interactions and possibly even the transhuman future envisioned in games like Deus Ex. Woo hoo. Did you watch it playing Rock Paper Scissors in slow motion? Look at it go!
Source: YouTube, via Ishikawa Oku Laboratory
