Japanese Scientists Create Rock-Paper-Scissors Robot That Wins Every Time

 Japanese scientists have developed a robot that is so fast it can beat any human at rock-paper-scissors every single time. The Janken robot (derived from the Japanese name of the game), it was originally developed by researchers at Ishikawa Oku Laboratory, part of  University of Tokyo in June 2012. In version two, everything is sped up, meaning the hand shape is chosen almost at the same time as the human hand.

The system is based on high-speed recognition and reaction, reading what the human hand is doing and making a premeditated action simultaneously. Technically, the robot is a cheater, but it's so fast the human eye does not realise this.

Janken takes just one millisecond (ms) - a thousandth of a second - to recognise the shape your hand is making, meaning a reaction to yours can be made almost simultaneously. To put this into perspective, version one took 20 ms and even that was indistinguishable.

High speed artificial intelligence with quick fire reactions like this could see a future in many areas of our lives, but we're on the way to a completely 0 ms robot.

When Skynet comes, you'll be dead before you even realise.