But Mike Trout already exists!
Jokes aside, this is a very interesting article from Wired. Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have created a robot that adapts to pitches using software which mimics the function of the human brain’s 100,000 neurons.
When a ball is pitched to the robot, an accelerometer at the back of a batting cage records information about the flight of the ball, including its speed, and this data is relayed back to a machine that holds the GPU-powered brain. The brain then crunches this data so that it can determine exactly when the robot should swing. If the scientists change the pitch speed, the robot will relearn the task all over again.
The robot already has better plate discipline than Delmon Young.
I, for one, welcome our baseball-playing robot overlords.
