Janken
Is it possible to win 100% playing the millennia-old game of Rock, Paper, Sissors? A new Janken robot (Janken is the Japanese name for Rock, Paper, Scissors – why is the West stuck with a French name for an ancient Egyptian game? It’s a mystery of linguistics) can win against humans without fail.
The Janken robot instead uses super-fast vision, according to its creators in the Ishikawa-Oku Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. The Janken robot’s high-speed vision system analyzes the position and the shape of the human hand and, because it can act in 1 millisecond, it recognizes whether rock, paper or scissors is being played and successfully counters it. It can’t lose. Think you will just change your mind? What about 1 millisecond do you not understand?


The janken robot is basically using the wrist angle as a tell, one that turns out to be the biggest tell of all for winning every time. It’s amazing that a 1-millisecond advantage that provides predictions with 100 percent accuracy can be derived from a measurement of the wrist angle. But there’s a good reason why humans can’t analyze wrist angles to pull off the same feat. We’re just too slow at making predictions.
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