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Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

reuters.com

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

#231

Post by galkk »

squigz wrote: post #159
spwa4 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is always the same. It's not just MoD (is it MoW now?) that will have access to this. YoloV8 + optical flow works fine on an esp32. You want to give a drone rough coordinates for a refinery and hit something in it, like a storage tank? That'll work. This means, give it 5 years, relatively small groups will have access to it. This cannot be stopped. The only real answer is to work to have groups that you c…

> The only real answer is to work to have groups that you can trust to have access to this first. How will this help exactly?

Don you know?

The world peace and harmony will be achieved when all the good guys will gather together and kill all the bad guys.

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

#232

Post by vachina »

dyauspitr wrote: post #219
f6v wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're all expecting China needs to invade Taiwan soon Ah yes, China has a track record of invading countries. > or they will run out of soldiers because of the one child policies of the 70s/80s As opposed to NATO countries who have a steady increase in the number of young conscripts. > Meanwhile, Ukraine is holding up against a "modern" army with quickly assembled drones. I don't know why you put modern in parenthe…

> Ah yes, China has a track record of invading countries. Claims on Taiwan. Building fake islands in the South China Sea. Encroaching on the Siachen glacier. Attempting to rename Indian states. Port capture in poor nations through default. They have plenty of expansionist tendencies, it’s just early in the game…

Sounds benign compared the kind of shit the Americans do.

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

#234

Post by rob74 »

Filligree wrote: post #178
scythe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

go fmt

I refuse. My code will be formatted according to my own preferences.

If you use node, you can do that... until someone decides to add eslint to the pipeline and you get thousands of formatting "errors" that you have to "fix".

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

#235

Post by spwa4 »

squigz wrote: post #159
spwa4 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is always the same. It's not just MoD (is it MoW now?) that will have access to this. YoloV8 + optical flow works fine on an esp32. You want to give a drone rough coordinates for a refinery and hit something in it, like a storage tank? That'll work. This means, give it 5 years, relatively small groups will have access to it. This cannot be stopped. The only real answer is to work to have groups that you c…

> The only real answer is to work to have groups that you can trust to have access to this first. How will this help exactly?

1) they'll know it exists in the first place

2) they can figure out a plan for when it happens

3) they can see if any countermeasures would be effective

4) they can figure out what to look for and find those weapons before they're fired

cfr. nuclear deterrence, right. There is "nothing" the US can do about other nations enriching uranium and making bombs, other than bombing those countries. The US can't change the laws of physics, follow the right formula and it'll work. However the US can figure out exactly what to look for to either prevent it from happening through intervention or at the very least get some warning before it's used ...

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

#236

Post by redsocksfan45 »

hermitcrab wrote: post #3
dmurray wrote: 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…

As a human player (of a not-high standard) I cannot see the spin of the ball directly. I can only infer it from the movement of my opponents bat. So I would wonder that a camera could pick it up in real time. Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!

[dead]

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

#237

Post by nateguchi »

hermitcrab wrote: post #3
dmurray wrote: 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…

As a human player (of a not-high standard) I cannot see the spin of the ball directly. I can only infer it from the movement of my opponents bat. So I would wonder that a camera could pick it up in real time. Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!

It's Wiff Waff actually [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uix9kXIMVRM

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

#238

Post by BeetleB »

nilslindemann wrote: post #138

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:…

> the primary purpose of AI is still, first and foremost, to relieve us of the physical labor we don't want to do.

That's for robots, not AI. There's a difference.

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

#239

Post by philwelch »

samiv wrote: post #225
philwelch wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a bit more complicated than I implied because many or most Taiwanese prior to the beginning of KMT rule were still ethnically Chinese; they just hadn't been part of "China" for 50 years (a period when there wasn't a stable, unified "China" anyway). "Occupation" is a controversial term for the period of Japanese rule and the Japanese weren't "hated" in Taiwan to the same degree they were in other occupied territories. The period of Japanese rule from 1895-1945 was a colonial government, but it was probably better than what was going on on the mainland at the time--domination by Western powers, the warlord era, the civil war, and a much more brutal Japanese occupation. The difference between Japan's treatment of Taiwan and mainland China is a big part of the difference in perspective towards the Japanese between the mainlanders and the Taiwanese.

Some of the main proponents of the "Japanese occupation" narrative are the KMT, who committed plenty of atrocities of their own after taking over Taiwan and, among many Taiwanese, ended up more hated than the Japanese. The KMT was also serious about their lost cause of retaking the mainland, at which point they expected Taiwan and China to remain unified under their rule, with the famous "One China Principle" representing not just the CCP's desire to control Taiwan, but the principle shared by the KMT that Taiwan is part of China and should be under the same government. In recent years, the KMT has pivoted towards cooperation with the CCP with an aim towards peaceful reunification, while the DPP favors explicit Taiwanese independence (Taiwan's official constitutional stance still being that it is the legitimate Republic of China).

To be fair to the KMT, they also ushered in Taiwanese democracy. When Chiang Kai-shek died, his son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo ended martial law, promised to be the last Chiang to rule Taiwan, and began the transition to democracy. His successor, Lee Teng-hui, was Taiwanese-born and finished the transition to democracy, winning the first democratic Taiwanese presidential election in 1996 before stepping down at the end of his term limit in 2000, at which point power transitioned to the DPP. Lee was also controversial with the hardliners in his own party for, among other things, his more sympathetic attitude towards Japan.

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

#240

Post by rmunn »

david422 wrote: post #208
drfloyd51 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a world where your editor shows you what you want to see… but saves in a standard format for sharing.

That's what tabs accomplish!

In theory, they do. In practice, I have only seen one codebase — ONE — in all my years of programming that was using tabs and yet did not end up with spaces getting mixed in with those tabs at some point along the way. (In the indentation, I mean: obviously once the non-indentation part of the line starts, you want spaces there). And that codebase had precisely two people committing regularly to it. Occasional PRs from other contributors, but only two primary maintainers.

Every other tab-using codebase I've seen (of non-trivial size and complexity, that is), someone, somewhere, had been lazy, or had a misconfigured editor, or something, and spaces snuck into the tabs. The worst offender I ever saw was a file that had been edited by multiple people over the years, who must have had different tab settings in their editors. There was one section where they had tried to line up a bunch of variable assignments and values. (Yes, I know, bad idea, but stick with me for a minute, I'm getting to the punchline). None of the pieces of code that were supposed to line up were actually lined up. (This was C# code, so indentation didn't truly matter like it would in F#, or Python, or ... well, I won't list all of them since I'm trying to get to the point). Here's the really hilarious part. I tried all sorts of tab settings to see if I could get that file to line up. I tried 8. I tried 4. I tried 2. I even tried 3, the setting for the people who can't make their minds up between 4 and 2. Then I tried really oddball settings like 16, 5, or even 7. Nothing worked. There was no tab-size setting I could use that would make the code line up.

That was the day I said "Forget about tabs, just use spaces, you won't have that problem with spaces." Tabs have great promise, but in practice, in my experience at least, you end up having to tell your colleagues "hey, you need to set your tabs to 4" (or 8) "before editing this file". Which almost negates the promise of tabs. They're great in theory, but I've only seen ONE codebase that made them work in practice.

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