It's time to welcome our new robot overlords, at least when it comes to playing rock-paper-scissors.
Researchers at the Sensor Fusion lab at the Ishikawa-Oku Laboratory in Japan have developed a robot that can beat humans at rock-paper-scissors 100 percent of the time.
But some may argue the robot is actually cheating: It uses a high-speed camera to sense the shape and positioning of the human hand and can therefore respond, within 1 millisecond, with a move that will beat the human's.
The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand. The vision recognizes one of rock, paper and scissors based on the shape of the human hand. After that, the robot hand plays one of rock, paper and scissors so as to beat the human being in 1ms.
Last year, The New York Times released a rock-paper-scissors game that pits the user against a computer. The user can choose to play against a "novice" computer that will learn only from that session, or a "veteran" computer that has the experience of more 200,000 rock-paper-scissors games under its belt.
For more on the rock-paper-scissors robot, click over to the Ishikawa-Oku Laboratory.