Super Baseball 2020 predicted a future where robots and cybernetically enhanced humans competed on the diamond for our enjoyment. Now some research at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo is starting to fulfill part of that prophecy.

Wired reports that researchers have built a baseball-playing robot learns more about the game as it plays. In other words, it will miss the first few pitches, but it will slowly learn where the ball is most likely to come from. After a while, it will start to hit more pitches and become more proficient in baseball.

The robot is able to quickly learn baseball thanks to its new brain that emulates a brain with about 100,000 neurons. According to Wikipedia, the fruit fly and lobster both have about 100,000 neurons in their brains. In comparison, the human brain has about 85 billion.

It may not have as many neurons as a human, but the researchers hope this latest robot can help them produce more complicated brains in the future. The end goal is to have robots perform complicated tasks that only humans and advanced animals, like apes, dolphins and elephants, can perform.

[Image: Wired]