Robots: kids love ‘em, but do we welcome our new robotic overlords now while we still have control over them or later when the eventual robot uprising takes place? Only time will truly tell, folks, but for now we have built a robot that will 100% of the time guaranteed beat you at rock-paper-scissors (or ro-sham-bo, or whatever else your camp counselor in 4th grade told you it was called.)

The robot uses a high-speed camera to predict what move you’ll throw right down to 1ms, so by using tiny hand movements undetectable to human eyes by the time you’ve thought about calling “scissors” the robot has already figured out that it should call “rock.” Pretty snazzy, huh?

Japan’s Ishikawa Oku Laboratories, who made the robot, have this to say:

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.