<p>If you've been to the RoboGames, you've seen everything from flame-throwing battlebots to androids that play soccer. But robo-athletes are more than just performers. They're a path to the future.</p><p>Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take swings at flying plastic balls, and though it may miss at first, it can learn with each new pitch and adjust its swing accordingly. Eventually, it will make contact.</p><p>The robot, you see, is also equipped with an artificial brain. Based on an Nvida graphics processor, or GPU, kinda to one that renders images on your desktop or laptop, this brain mimics the function of about 100,000 neurons, and using a software platform developed by Nvidia, the scientists have programmed these neurons for the task at hand, as they discussed in a recent paper published in the journal Neural Networks.</p><p>Yes, it's fun. But through this baseball-playing robot, the scientists also hope to better understand how brains can be recreated with software and hardware and bring us closer to a world where robots can handle more important tasks on our behalf.</p><p><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/robot-baseball/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://nesn.com/2013/04/baseball-playing-robot-created-by-scientists-in-japan-adjusts-to-pitch-speed-video/">Baseball-Playing Robot Created by Scientists in Japan Adjusts to Pitch Speed ...</a> (NESN.com)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dnTgkpJI0IV8KdMZJrunpRc8K_udM&ned=us">2 additional articles.</a></p>