[Noisebridge-discuss] But rock, paper, scissors?!

[Jake]

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0627/Robot-beats-human-at-rock-paper-scissors.-Every-time.

It was somewhat more unsettling when they started mastering trivia. But 
even when IBM's supercomputer, Watson, defeated Jeopardy! champion Ken 
Jennings last year, we meatbags could comfort ourselves by knowing that 
all the machine was really doing was plucking keywords and searching the 
encyclopedias stored in its four-terabyte hard disk.

But rock, paper, scissors?!

Apparently what most of us had assumed was an innocent game of chance, an 
equitable way of say, determining who gets to ride shotgun, is actually a 
computational problem that can be measured, analyzed, and, if your'e a 
robot with a high-speed camera and lightning-quick motors, mastered.

A robot at the University of Tokyo's Ishikawa Oku Lab has done just that. 
Dubbed the "human-machine cooperation system"  "cooperation" being a 
robotics term for "humiliation"  this mechanical hand is able to beat a 
human opponent at rock paper scissors. Every time.