Researchers in Japan made a robot arm that always wins at rock, paper, scissors (a game completely of chance). Not with ultra-clever psychology, which is the way that the best humans play, but with old-fashioned cheating. The robot uses high-speed motors and precise computer vision systems to recognise whether its human opponent is making the sign for rock, paper or scissors. One millisecond later, it can play the sign that beats whatever the human chooses. Because the whole process is so quick, it looks to humans like the robot is playing at the same time. See for yourself by clicking below to watch the video of this amazing cheating robot.
Above: Janken (rock-paper-scissors) Robot with 100% winning rate (26 June 2012)
– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
Did you know?
The word ‘robot’ came to the English language over 100 years ago in the early 1920s. Before that the words ‘automaton’ or ‘android’ were used. In 1920 Czech playwright Karel Čapek published his play “R.U.R.” (Rossum’s Universal Robots, or Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti) and his brother Josef suggested using ‘roboti’, from the Slavic / Czech word meaning ‘forced labour’. In the late 1930s there was a performance of the play at the People’s Palace in London’s Stepney Green / Mile End – this building is now part of Queen Mary University of London (some of our computer science lectures take place there) and, one hundred years on, QMUL also has a Centre for Advanced Robotics.
More on … cheating
1. Winning at Rock Paper Scissors – Numberphile
Above: an entertaining look at a research paper investigating potential winning strategies (January 2015).
2. Bullseye! Mark Rober’s intelligent dart board
Above: our earlier article on Mark Rober’s robotic darts board which, like the rock paper robot, uses high-speed cameras to sense a dart, computing to work out where it will land and high-speed motors to move itself into position so your throw gets a high score.
3. The Intelligent Piece of Paper Activity
Above: a strategy for never losing at noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) – as long as you go first.
Related Magazine …
More on robotics
Above: our portal gathers together lots of our articles on robots and robotics.
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