An android has been created by the Toyota Engineering Society and it scores baskets better than professional basketball players. The robot is named CUE and uses artificial intelligence to learn to play better than players from the Japanese B League team Alvark Tokyo.
The robot now has an accuracy close to 100% at short distances. The team, sponsored by Toyota has adopted CUE and assigned it the number 70 jersey and the position of shooting guard. The robot has a height of 6 foot and 3 inches.
There is one drawback though. The robot does not actually move so the chance of it appearing in any B League fixtures is very minimal. The robot was inspired by Sakuragi Hanamichi, the protagonist of the manga Slam Dunk. The reports in The Asahi Shimbun and Newsweek, the robot uses artificial intelligence to learn to make better shots by having practised over 200,000 times.
17 engineers were inspired to make the report and interestingly, none of them had any robotic experience prior to building CUE. You can check it out in the video here.