A basketball robot in Japan was perfect from the free throw-line against human hoops players after sprucing up its shot with the use of artificial intelligence, the Japanese news agency Asahi Shimbun said.
The story, picked up by the English-written website The Verge, said engineers at Toyota taught the robot how to shoot and then put it to the test against real basketball players from the locally based Alvark Tokyo squad. The Verge wrote that the specific AI technology used to make the robot a free-throw shooting machine was not revealed.
SB Nation wrote that the basketball shooting robot, called "Cue," is helped along by the fact that robots "can't be phased" by surrounding turmoil or the pressure that comes with one second left in the game and free throws meaning the difference between winning and losing.
"That said, the technology under the hood (does a robot have a hood?) is pretty impressive," wrote SB Nation. "To mimic a human shot requires a series of actuators moving in concert to replicate the motion of shooting a free throw — which is astounding."
The buzz around the robot comes right in the heart of "March Madness" in the United States, as college basketball teams around the country are playing in the wildly popular NCAA basketball tournament where fans will be hanging on every shot and free throw of their favorite team.
While a video of the foul-shooting robot has gone viral with more than 156,000 views on YouTube since late February, some were not impressed with its overall game.
"Still, it's a free–throw competition – humans still have a gigantic lead on other aspects of basketball, like most of them, in fact," wrote Darrell Etherington, of Tech Crunch. "Don't get me started on the dunk competition."
The robot created plenty of curiosity on social media.