While the BitbeamBot can do more than just play everyone's favorite smart phone game, its inventor figured it would be a fun way to demonstrate his creation's capabilities.
Jason Huggins, founder and CEO of Sauce Labs, recently demoed his robot at the PyCon 2012, a convention dedicated to the Python, a computer programming language. In the following, he explains the genesis of the project, which originally had nothing do with goofing off and playing games:
As Huggins touches upon, things built need to be tested, an un-fun fact of life that has been around since the dawn of civilization. In modern times, such necessary monotony used to be in the form of a button that had to be pressed over and over again.
With the advent of touch screen interfaces, swiping across a screen might take it's place, which the BitbeamBot hopes to take care off ... before it rises up and kills us all, that is.
At the very least, according to The Unofficial Apple Weblog, the BitbeamBot is apparently very good at "Angry Birds." And I can't seem to recall the T-800 having any kind of personality trait of its own, other than learning how to say "hasta la vista, baby" in "Terminator 2."
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Matthew Hawkins is an NYC-based game journalist who has also written for EGM, GameSetWatch, Gamasutra, Giant Robot and numerous others. He also self-publishes his own game culture zine, is part of Attract Mode , and co-hosts The Fangamer Podcast . You can keep tabs on him via Twitter , or his personal home-base, FORT90.com .
