Victor the robot plays a mean game of Scrabble

It’s not enough that you no longer play board games on literal boards against other humans. We play on game systems like Xbox or on social media such as Facebook. Now robots are starting to play against us too.

Victor is a Scrabble-playing Gamebot developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute to study human-robot interaction. Developed under the direction of Reid Simmons, a research professor at CMU, Victor the Gamebot is the latest in a series of so-called social robots that anticipate a time when people and robots will interact routinely.

“We believe that for autonomous robots to be accepted, they will have to conform to the social conventions of people, rather than the other way around,” Simmons said in a statement. The researchers are investigating whether changes in mood or emotions affect the desire to interact with robots and how personalization, such as the robot remembering a person’s play from previous games, might affect the willingness to interact over time.

Victor plays with all the emotion a normal human being plays with, and includes a heightened sense of bravado coupled with some mean trash-talking skills that are much in evidence when it’s winning. On the flip-side, the bot exhibits downright moodiness when it’s on the losing end of things.

Watch the video to see Victor in action: 

Source: CMU School of Computer Science