If you look at what people in the 70s thought the 2010s were going to be like, it’s easy to feel a little bit as though we let them down. We don’t have immense, glistening pyramid cities floating on the oceans. We don’t have a generation of children born on the Moon. We’re still heavily reliant on fossil fuels. 3D TV exists but just kinda sucks. We didn’t quite become the slick, polished utopia that the optimistic futurists of the past envisioned, but we’ve got something: artificial intelligence that can recognise all 9,000+ Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.
As Kotaku is reporting, Konami unveiled this incredibly significant technological advance at this year’s meeting of the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association, a Japanese games industry organisation founded to “promote the computer entertainment industry. . . with the aim of contributing to the strengthening of Japanese industry as well as to the further enrichment of people’s lifestyles.”
[jwplayer QW9A6EZk]
This isn’t Konami’s first crack at a card-identifying intelligence — apparently their first go resulted in an AI that, after 20 days of learning the cards, could only identify about half of them. Ditching that, they created a new version in which “CG versions of the cards were created with two variations merged into semi-transparent compositions.” No, I have no idea what that means either.
The result, however, was an AI that was able to pick every single Yu-Gi-Oh! card with 100 per cent accuracy after a four to five day period of learning the cards.
Obviously, the possible uses for this are basically limitless, and there’s no point going into what they might be here. (Full disclosure: I cannot think of a single one.)
Will the robots of the future absolutely demolish us with skillfully deployed trap cards, humiliating the human race so much that we cede the control of the means of production to the machine race? Only time will tell.
