A pair of Chinese developers have created a robot that plays Flappy Bird much better than you ever will.
I didn’t like Flappy Bird. I also wasn’t very good at it, and yes, the latter may have had something to do with the former. In any case, I installed it, played with it and ditched it just a few minutes later, and have been baffled ever since (as I so often am these days) by its popularity.
Chinese guys Liu Yang and Shi Xuekun took a different approach. I don’t know how good they actually are at the game, but I’m pretty sure they’re not as good as the robot they built that plays it for them. It’s a gawky-looking thing, comprised of a web cam and a stylus-tipped arm powered by an old hard drive, that took them four days to make.
And boy, does it work. Look at it tap! Look at it flap! That bird is sailing through those pipes like nobody’s business! And I suppose it is nobody’s business, because despite its obvious ability to play Flappy Bird like a champ, this robot, like all others, does not possess the sentience necessary for it to be regarding as a unique and self-aware individual.
But it is pretty cool, as kind of a “Lo Tek” machine that doesn’t do anything more than mercilessly crush my high score. Which isn’t saying much in and of itself, since my high score was somewhere in the neighborhood of roughly 2, but I doubt yours would fare any better.
Source: YouTube
