The robot already always always wins the “rock-paper-scissors”

It is very simple. Scissors cut the paper, the paper covers the stone, the stone crushes the lizard, the lizard poisons Spock, Spock breaks the scissors, the scissors cut the head off the lizard, the lizard eats paper, the paper lies under Spock, Spock vaporizes the stone, and, as usual, the stone breaks the scissors.
Dr. Sheldon Cooper.

In July 2012, engineers at Ishikawa Oku University of Tokyo lab showedhis robot Janken of the first version, which masterfully knows how to “play” “rock-paper-scissors”. The robot, in fact, consists of three fingers, which, however, can fold like the fingers of a human hand and shake like a folded fist. The technical premise of such a slightly frivolous project was that the task was to develop a gesture control system with the shortest possible response time for the system, which is relevant for a number of computer vision system applications.

The main advantage of the Janken robot was that it reacted very quickly to the shape of the hand of the person with whom it had to play, so strictly speaking, we were not talking about the “game” as such. Technically, the system was accomplished as expected: a special high-speed camera recorded finger movements, the photo was analyzed by the system and, about 20 ms after the person showed, for example, a “stone”, Janken threw out his answer - of course, such as to beat a person.


Strictly speaking, even such a reaction of the robot would be enough for entertainment purposes, but since the task was still technical, the engineers were able to improve the response time of Janken by receiving Janken 2.0. The authors do not name the exact reaction time, but it is obvious that it is less than the previously mentioned 20 ms, so now people have absolutely no chance.

This improvement is shown in the diagram below:



And how the game itself actually happens can be seen in the video:



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