Flappy Bird’s wings clipped by Chinese robot
Print Edition
Two Chinese entrepreneurs have developed a robot that can play the popular mobile game Flappy Bird, generating a peak score of 180 points, higher than most human players.
Flappy Bird, which requires players to navigate a bird through green pipes to gain scores, is popular both globally and in China because of the difficulty in repeatedly tapping one’s fingers.
The robot, developed by Liu Yang and Shi Xuekun of Cloud-Tea Studio, consists of a sensor system, a robot hand and programs to control them. The camera detects the positions of pipes and informs the system to control the robot hand, a part of a computer disk, to tap the bird to avoid hitting the pipes.
“The project was meant to test our programming level and it has yielded lots of fun for us and our friends,” Shi told Shanghai Daily in a phone interview yesterday.
Liu and Shi used the recent one-week Spring Festival holiday to finish the project.
The current Flappy Bird system has a peak score of 180 points but it will hit much higher with improving programming, according to Shi.
Without practice, players only get less than three points in the game. A majority of players get peak scores of less than 100 points.
Flappy Bird was developed in Hanoi by Vietnam-based developer Dong Nguyen. The side-scrolling mobile game features 2D retro-style graphics. The objective is to direct a flying bird, which moves continuously to the right, between each oncoming set of pipes without colliding with them, which otherwise ends the game.
Then Nguyen removed the game from Apple Store and Google Play Store last week because of its “addictive nature.”
Following the removal, phones that had the app pre-installed were sold on eBay for US$1,499 or more, according to media reports.
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