This Crazy Intelligent Robot Will Beat You At Rock, Paper, Scissors Every Time

This new robot from the University of Tokyo wins any round of the hand game you play with it. It’s the third generation design by researchers at Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory, Daily Dot reports.

The robot manages to do this with help from a high-speed camera that’s pointed at a stabilized silhouette of the human opponent’s hand.

The computer runs visual algorithms that determine what sign the hand is going to throw while it’s still in the process of moving into position. The computer then sends the appropriate winning sign to its three-fingered hand which plays it in response. The whole process takes a millisecond.

It is so far undefeated.

Check it out.

The Rock, Papers, Scissors robot (known as ‘Janken’ in Japanese) successfully demonstrates an idea called cooperative control. This is based on the notion that humans and robots will have to work alongside each other in the future, so these robots should be controlled with natural inputs.

With this experiment, the University of Tokyo team have proved that this is possible.

But don’t worry, the robot isn’t beating a human at the game, rather it’s processing inputs and reacting within a narrow, preprogrammed scope. On a fundamental level, human hand gestures are controlling the electronic hand, it’s just programmed with the response that will win the game every time.