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I’m pretty good at rock paper scissors, mainly through years of mental training. This Japanese robot, however, uses high speed cameras to guess what you’re doing and cheat. Damn you SkyNet. Leave us our dignity.

In this research we develop a janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot with 100% winning rate as one example of human-machine cooperation systems. Human being plays one of rock, paper and scissors at the timing of one, two, three. According to the timing, the robot hand plays one of three kinds so as to beat the human being.

Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. 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.

This technology is one example that show a possibility of cooperation control within a few miliseconds. And this technology can be applied to motion support of human beings and cooperation work between human beings and robots etc. without time delay. (Ishikawa Oku Laboratory)

If you’re playing against humans, there are some useful tips here. One trick I’ve found handy is to lead with paper (cause novices think rock is strong). Another is to throw what would have lost to your opponents last throw. They’re unlikely to throw the same thing again. People also subconsciously throw the thing that would’ve beat their last one. This works best if they’re losing, which they should be.

Also, you say rock, paper scissors SHOOT and you throw on shoot. So many people throw on scissors (ie, 1,2,3), which is biased in itself.