> This robot hand will beat you at rock-paper-scissors 100% of the time. It can recognise a competing hand gesture in 1 millisecond and move its own hand to make the winning gesture to complete at the same time.
This is one of those things that is surprisingly un-hard, though I don't claim a 100 % success rate.
On a non-competitive level, people tend to open into their choice on the way down. The strategy I use is to look for if their fingers unfurl, and then I immediately fold out scissors. In all other cases I keep a fist.
This works because paper is such an obvious shape even early on in the movement. If their fingers go out, they are doing either paper or scissors, which will on average be beaten by scissors. If their fingers don't go out early, it's either scissors or rock, which on average is beaten by rock.
Having worked on home robotics (in university, for RoboCup@Home so nothing commercial), home robots now finally feel really feasible. The breakthroughs from LLMs and other ML technologies could finally bring this dream to reality.
I'd gladly pay 10k for a robot to do all the chores at home.
My take is that this is an opportunity to re-think what chores are, and what white goods are for
Like -- let's say you rent (as we all do, increasingly). Instead of buying different special purpose kitchen gadgets, white goods, and cleaning equipment to haul around with you, why not a general purpose robot that does the easy 80% of all chores?
Yes, it's an opportunity to simplify the home. You don't need labor saving devices if you don't need to save labor.
You're saying: why buy a dishwasher and a washing machine and a dryer and a vacuum robot etc if you could buy a home robot to do all of those chores by robot-hand?
The answer is going to be energy efficiency. Your dishwasher uses dramatically less power and water than you would use, if washing them by hand.
> Your dishwasher uses dramatically less power and water than you would use, if washing them by hand.
Only if used optimally, or the handwashing is very wasteful. There is one study I know of, it was paid for by washing machine manufacturers and has quite a few issues (like not removing outliers).
And yes, I measured my usage of water and power.
(I’d still get a dishwasher if my kitchen had space for it)
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure most people only care about money efficiency: what choice is cheaper, now and over time.
That’ll still be the dishwasher, then.
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Somebody please build me that home defrag robot!