If you needed further proof that we're quickly approaching the day when robots will outperform humans in all our endeavors, you may want to turn your attention to a tech demo for the Guitar Hero-playing "Cythbot", which we've posted after the jump. Using a light-measuring camera and six pneumatic "fingers", the Cythbot can strum its way through Guitar Hero's more difficult songs with terrifying accuracy -- check out the Expert run through Living Color's "Cult of Personality" in the embedded video.
It's l33t how even the machines are choosing the Wii over the other consoles. If the machines are telling us HD doesn't matter yet, then it must be true!!!
Isaac Asimov says: "So robots: Start rock bands. Set down the Guitar Hero, learn how to play an actual guitar and start a band, because it's hard to find more bands to put a robotic rock-and-roll package together, to get out there. It's getting harder and harder, but I think we've done it."
Something about the way this cold, unfeeling machine adds some kind of sick "personality" to the song by even taking the effort to strum the Whammy Bar seriously terrifies me. I'm not even kidding.
Do you even get a benefit of using the whammy bar in Guitar Hero? You do in RB (builds up extra overdrive), I just don't really play the competition, so I'm not sure.
I'd be much more impressed if this robot had only four fingers to fret with instead of five though.
You do get a benefit of extra points, but about the 5 fingers, robots have the advantage of having as many fingers as they want. You can't hold that against them. :/
What frightens me is that someone took the time to make a machine that simulates a player simulating a rockstar. At this point, it's a machine raping another machine, who is pretending to enjoy it.
Im sorry i find it appalling that so many people would waste so much time on a useless endeavor such as this. :(
last time i checked there were bigger problems to deal with than, "hey do you have a robot to play guitar hero?, No, well shit let me get right on that!"
Who are you to judge what a company does? It's not like taxpayer money is going to this.
Also, this is quite obviously not their final product; they're going to build on what they figured out from this setup and useful products in the future.
Anyways, video games are probably a worse use of time than the implementation of a Guitar Hero-playing robot, Mr. JeSuZ Cicle of the Joystiq Moral Police
I see an interesting improvement on visual recognition software. Hardly a waste of time. It does have kinks to workout (4 of them, 1 for each missed stroke), but it's quite the project. Judging by the surroundings and time of year, this is likely a semester end project for an engineering student.
I'm pretty shocked at how much people think this kind of project is a waste of time. This is great progress towards better visual recognition and hand-eye-coordination for robots, one of the main issues in robotics right now. Once we can get machines to recognize visual cues and react to them properly, we can achieve much greater, "useful" feats.
Calling anything like this a "waste of time" just proves you don't know how scientific progress works. Electricity was discovered by Ben jerking off and flying a kite in the air for hours.
Haha @ WiiFTW I think your just jealous they havent developed a robot to jack you off at night, while you silently weep and stroke your Wii, while whispering "shhhh, the good games will come, I promise"
They say it can't FC a song because sometimes the notes come too fast for the pneumatics to work. It doesn't seem to recognize HO/PO notes, so it's essentially brute forcing the entire solo. It's kind of impressive on that count. I doubt people who FC songs approach them that way since, for the most part, strumming is "just another thing to go wrong."
Also, the way the robot moves the whammy bar is hilarious. XD
You definitely need to learn to use the hammers ons. You can play without and muddle through for a lot of songs, but you reach a plateau where you just can't do any more without them.
