Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo
and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a
small humanoid robot that plays baseball — or something like it.
The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take swings at flying
plastic balls, and though it may miss at first, it can learn
with each new pitch and adjust its swing accordingly.
Eventually, it will make contact. The robot, you see, is also
equipped with an artificial brain. Based on an Nvida graphics
processor, or GPU, kinda like the one that renders images on
your desktop or laptop, this brain mimics the function of about
100,000 neurons, and using a software platform developed by
Nvidia, the scientists have programmed these neurons for the
task at hand, as they discussed in a recent paper published in
the journal Neural Networks. Yes, it’s fun. But through this
baseball-playing robot, the scientists also hope to better
understand how brains can be recreated with software and
hardware — and bring us closer to a world wher