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.
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.
I had a look at Google trends for France. Table tennis is slightly more common than ping pong but the latter is much more stable. Table tennis has huge peaks, the biggest one being during the OG in Paris. These parks are not reflected in there ping pong trend
Interestingly, for Youtube searches this is the other way, with a much bigger difference in favour to ping pong
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 ?
I don't think Russian army is very modern -- but maybe that's the reason of your quotation marks.
I kinda think that the competitions among the big dogs (US/Russia/China/etc.) would eventually green light ANY AI/Robots projects if they can justify tipping the scale somehow, and in the process completely destroys the last element of any political counter-weight. Because "fear gives men wings".
I would really hate to live in a dystopian world worse than what is described in the books/movies.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, May 7 1840.
When he was a little boy he never played out in the streets of Votkinsk like the other little children of Votkinsk, because when Tchaikovsky was one month old, his parents moved to St. Petersburg.
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.
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.
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.
I do expect this to have a "novelty edge" over human opponents - which can be closed with practice, on the human end.
And, like many AIs, it can have "jagged capability" gaps, with inhuman failure modes living in them - which humans can learn to exploit, but the robot wouldn't adapt to their exploitation because it doesn't learn continuously. Happened with various types of ML AIs designed to fight humans.
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.
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.
Am I correct in my understanding that- they had specialized software that not only tracked the ball, calculated spins using the logo, and fed calculated trajectories?
Even club level players have access to tennis table 'robots'. They fire the ball at you and collect the return in a net. You can set the speed, position and spin. They are very basic compared to this robot, but useful for training.
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.
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
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!
According to this video it can read the spin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
I had a look at Google trends for France. Table tennis is slightly more common than ping pong but the latter is much more stable. Table tennis has huge peaks, the biggest one being during the OG in Paris. These parks are not reflected in there ping pong trend
Interestingly, for Youtube searches this is the other way, with a much bigger difference in favour to ping pong
Makes sense that it would.
Reminds me of this old The Onion story: https://theonion.com/ping-pong-somehow-elicits-macho-posturi...
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 ?
China had more births in 2025 than all of europe and russia combined so I don't think they're going to run out of soldiers.
Marching humanoid terminator robots will never be as cheap as a drone. Autonomous suicide drone swarms are what should terrify you.
I don't think Russian army is very modern -- but maybe that's the reason of your quotation marks.
I kinda think that the competitions among the big dogs (US/Russia/China/etc.) would eventually green light ANY AI/Robots projects if they can justify tipping the scale somehow, and in the process completely destroys the last element of any political counter-weight. Because "fear gives men wings".
I would really hate to live in a dystopian world worse than what is described in the books/movies.
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."
I used to love Mitch Hedberg. I still do, but I used to, too.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, May 7 1840.
When he was a little boy he never played out in the streets of Votkinsk like the other little children of Votkinsk, because when Tchaikovsky was one month old, his parents moved to St. Petersburg.
— Victor Borge
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.
It's an amazing feat of engineering because it requires constant micro-adjustments, something that robots couldn't do a few years ago.
isn't this a technology forum?
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.
quite surprised to see SAC, considering the deepmind ping pong paper resorted to evolutionary strategies, iirc
Nature video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
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.
I do expect this to have a "novelty edge" over human opponents - which can be closed with practice, on the human end.
And, like many AIs, it can have "jagged capability" gaps, with inhuman failure modes living in them - which humans can learn to exploit, but the robot wouldn't adapt to their exploitation because it doesn't learn continuously. Happened with various types of ML AIs designed to fight humans.
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.
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.
I'll be impressed when it's a humanoid robot that has to contend with similar kinematic limitations as a human player.
Is there a video of this in action? Pictures are not satisfying at all!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
https://sonyresearch.github.io/ace_public/
Am I correct in my understanding that- they had specialized software that not only tracked the ball, calculated spins using the logo, and fed calculated trajectories?
I wonder if a top player with access to a robot like this can get an extra edge in training?
Even club level players have access to tennis table 'robots'. They fire the ball at you and collect the return in a net. You can set the speed, position and spin. They are very basic compared to this robot, but useful for training.
The greatest blernsball player was a machine for playing blernsball.
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.
robot ping pong league
AI gets all the fun jobs. Yet again.
Now build a robot that can catch a bullet.
careful what you wish for.
> 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!