My summer project: a rock-paper-scissors machine built on TensorFlow Google Cloud Big Data and Machine Learning Blog Google Cloud Platform

After looking for a fun project to do with my son this past summer, I decided to build a rock-paper-scissors machine powered by TensorFlow. As in the above video, the system uses the glove's sensors to detect my son's hand gesture, then selects the appropriate hand pose: rock, paper, or scissors.. Excitingly, TensorFlow is the secret ingredient. It runs a very simple machine learning (ML) algorithm that detects your hand posture through an Arduino micro controller connected to the glove. In this way, ML is used as a handy tool to build a flexible, robust and accurate motion detector in a few hours -- which is great for a lazy programmer like me! In this post, I'll show you how we built the rock-paper-scissors machine, and teach you how to use ML as a programming tool to solve everyday problems. Almost anyone can do it with just a little programming experience and about $200 in hardware.