Is there anything in the history of human endeavour more mind numbingly pointless than the rock paper scissors game? Throughout the years countless long car trips and dull evenings in the house have been made even more boring thanks to this ridiculous game.
Well, there is something more ridiculously pointless than the game; a robot which wins it every single blooming time it plays. Scientists in Japan came up with a robot called Janken which is unbeatable at rock paper scissors when playing against humans.
Intensely Annoying to Play Against
This is a faster version of a robot which the researchers showed to the public back in June of 2012. What this robot does is recognise the shape being formed by the human’s hand almost at the same time it is being made. This means that it can produce its own shape based on the human one and guarantee a victory every time, which would make it intensely annoying to play against.
Of course, this means that the new version of Janken is a dirty rotten cheat, because it sees what the person is doing and reacts to this, rather than trying to predict the shape the human is going to make. In fact, it takes just 1 single millisecond to see what shape it is up against and then produce one which beats it. The first version of Janken produced its chosen shape 20ms after the human one but this one does it at almost exactly the same time. Hopefully there will be some useful applications for it as well.
Would you take on a robot at rock paper scissors?
