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Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

reuters.com

221–230 of 280 posts

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#221

I don’t care about robots being better than humans at human achievement. Would anyone ever watch Clankers play hockey against eachother at a Clanker Olympics? The idea is absurd, I want to see humans competing because they are humans not just because they are good.

I absolutely think people will watch humanoid robots fight to the “death”. I also think they will watch them do incredible parkour, run the 100m in 5 secs, do 1000 mile marathons, etc. with the important caveat being that they are humanoid shaped.

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#222
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to happen and at some level I'd rather war casualties were measured in robots rather than people. My concern is the cottage industry of integrating guns with half baked AI at the lowest cost. And probably vibe coded too. The companies don't care - a sale is a sale. MoD maybe doesn't care - 90% accuracy and less human casualties on their own side are a win. Governments want to save money and by the time the…

I can't wait for the day that killing a human-any human-is considered a war crime.

And then it will be just another war crime committed daily conflicts, and nothing will happen because there is no world police ?

Ask Ukrainians, Lebanese, Gazaoui, Somalilanders, or even Iranians for that matters - that may not make a big difference to today...

What I would love to see is a local government suing an arms producer for the efficacy of their weapons. (Or even funnier, the owner of a home destroyed by a drone, suiving the GPS company.)

We all know that the only things people in suits are really afraid of, more than hell, is a bad Q4 report and an expensive lawsuit.

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#223
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess players learned to exploit chess computers’ weaknesses in the beginning too, but they can’t any longer. This version of the robot might not learn continuously, but the next will be better.

I believe there are still some echoes of the concept. Even top engines will play certain grandmaster draw lines unless told more or less explicitly not to. So if you were playing a match against Stockfish you'd want to play the Berlin draw as White every time, for example.

But chess is a turn-based game where there's no deception (in the sense that both players can see all legal moves for both themselves and their opposition at all times), whereas in table tennis, it's in real time, it's fast as hell, the table is small, and the ball can have 2 or 3 different spin types from the same arm/hand/wrist movement , and can land in a number of different spots.

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#224
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like software developers who write javascript wanting to be called engineers, isn't it

They're not even controlling a train or wearing a stripey hat. Losers.

You are right, I am wearing 2 stripey hats!

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#225
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Taiwanese while being proud Taiwanese (rather than Chinese) are culturally Chinese. After all they came from the mainland after having lost the civil war. What you said about them siding with China against a common aggressor makes sense. In fact they already did this against the Japanese and took a pause from their onw conflict to fight the Japanese together during WW2. And it's also true that this "China aggress…

The majority of Taiwanese are the descendants of the people who lived there before 1949, not the descendants of the Chinese Nationalists who fled there at the end of the civil war. In fact, the Taiwanese were, uniquely among East Asian nationalities, relatively happy being part of the Japanese Empire and have maintained good relations with Japan ever since.

You're correct. But in practice the native people have been assimilated and the predominant culture is that of "Chinese'

Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese during the WW2 and just like everywhere else the Japanese were hated for their criminal actions. Taiwan was no exception. Today there also disputes for example the Senkaku islands.

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#226

I find Sony's work valuable. In my opinion, the primary purpose of AI is still, first and foremost, to relieve us of the physical labor we don't want to do. The next step to be taken is to create a universal basic income. Evolution will then unfold, as creative people will be able to dedicate their whole life undisturbed to the problems they deem important. Here a video where one can actually see the robot in action:…

I agree with you. The people developing AI don’t agree.

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#228
post #2

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…

[dead]

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#229

Glad to see new kind of robots other than those cliche dog like ones....that does nothing but walk. In india its pretty much seen in every public event as a marketing gimmick.

> robots other than those cliche dog like ones....that does nothing but walk.

They may be testing camera's and microphones.

Re: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can predict the movement of the ball (speed, direction, spin) based on the movement of the bat relative to the ball. What the rest of the player's body is doing is irrelevant to predicting what the ball will do - but relevant to predicting where they will be when you make the return shot.

That's not how humans operate though. Humans use every clue they can get to predict the trajectory as early as possible. For example most players use a roughly similar technique for a certain stroke, e.g. the forehand topspin. They also tend to have a pretty narrow angle that they usually play it, relative to their body and their movement. Players use that predict where the ball will move, and position themselves acc…

What the ball does is only determined by the contact with the bat. But it is true that you can often correctly predict what the bat will do based on the movement of the player's body.
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