Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

dmurray

A year ago this [0] table tennis robot backed by Google DeepMind was discussed on HN. It plays much worse and the HN discussion is anchored around whether it's OK to call it "human-level" or if the authors should have clarified that they meant a human who doesn't actually play table tennis. But it was accepted as being SOTA at that time. What happened since then? This looks like the kind of level of advance we see in, say, coding AIs, but I thought physical robotics was advancing much more slowly. A partial answer is that the new robot cheats in ways that DeepMind didn't seem to. It has high speed cameras all over the room and can detect spin by observing the logo on the ball. But I'm not sure this explains such a big advance. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43861207

amandle

Reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke: "The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall."

halfnhalf

Don't table tennis players learn to predict how the ball will act based on their opponents movements? Seems like if they aren't able to do that with a robot opponent (who doesn't look or behave like a human) then they wouldn't be able to play at their best.

tartoran

Cool. Now let's see two robots play and if it's fun let it become it's own thing. Other than that, this could be used for training actual players.

finger

I wonder if a top player with access to a robot like this can get an extra edge in training?

tantalor

> Now, Wireless Joe Jackson! There was a blern hitting machine. > Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns. I mean come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but programmable bat on wheels. > Oh? And I suppose Pitch-o-mat 5000 was just a modifier howitzer? > Yep!

janalsncm

Here is the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10338-5 I would love to see a video of this thing that shows the whole table. From the paper I guess they have to light the area very brightly. But it seems like a pretty serious set up.

metadat

Is there a video of this in action? Pictures are not satisfying at all!

phtrivier

My biggest fear at the moment is robot armies and police forces. Case in point : we're all expecting China needs to invade Taiwan soon, or they will run out of soldiers because of the one child policies of the 70s/80s. Meanwhile, Ukraine is holding up against a "modern" army with quickly assembled drones. So it all seems a bit like "they'll never put tanks through the Ardennes", sort of ? Where and when will the first invasion of a country by a purely remote controlled, AI assisted army take place ? Will robot battalions embed civilians to act as human shields ? Will the AI learn to mistreat the locals to maintain fear, or will they see it as a needless distraction and rush to the center of powers ? If war is mostly played out from a disrance, will years of playing RTS give South Korea an edge ?

retrochameleon

I'll be impressed when it's a humanoid robot that has to contend with similar kinematic limitations as a human player.

amelius

AI gets all the fun jobs. Yet again. Now build a robot that can catch a bullet.

allthetime

Much like the robots beating half marathon records in China recently… who cares? Cake making robots can make cakes way faster than human bakers. Cars and motorcycles go faster than bicyclists. It is a boring given that purpose made machines perform the tasks they are built to perform better than humans.

slowhadoken

The greatest blernsball player was a machine for playing blernsball.

mgh2

Nature video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk

ChrisMarshallNY

Makes sense that it would. Reminds me of this old The Onion story: https://theonion.com/ping-pong-somehow-elicits-macho-posturi...

jcims

The motion system constrains the problem quite a bit. This video of high speed vision/actuators is 16 years old - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdHY26E2jc I was expecting/hoping for a humanoid robot.

chasil

What happens when two of them play each other? How easy is it to introduce artifacts that reduce accuracy and performance?

sd9

The official Sony AI video, which is really interesting and has some glorious footage: https://youtu.be/FrGq8ltb-_E?si=PWm1Dv0T9UHUFw0t

nemo44x

Well, I guess we’re going to fire all the Ping-pong players at the office and replace them with these robots.

jmward01

I'm not that excited about 'x beats human at y' anymore. I am more interested in 'x beats human at made up on the spot tasks p d and q'. That is starting to happen more generically and is a bigger sign of emerging capability. We can always create something confined that will beat humans, it isn't until recently that we are starting to be able to generally beat humans at tasks.