AI ping pong robot beats top human players, but don’t freak out yet

If you're primed to fear AI-driven robots replacing human workers at complex physical tasks, consider this your trigger warning. A robot arm built by Sony, and named Ace, has just been dubbed "the first autonomous system to be competitive with elite human table tennis players." That's a quote from the study splashed across the front page of Nature, the world's most venerable peer-reviewed science journal. The Ace researchers brought receipts. As you can see in the video above, the eight-jointed robot arm is able to make split-second decisions via an AI that's being fed real-time data from nine cameras. It scored a lot of points and won a few games against some of the world's top ping-pong players at Sony HQ in Tokyo. But here's the good news buried in all the data. Yes, within the confines of this study, Ace was competitive. That doesn't mean Ace could figure out how to win every time; it's nothing like the half marathon-running robot that simply has to master one speed. And, crucially, the human players started to spot flaws in Ace's ping-pong strategy. Ace isn't the first ping-pong playing robot. Researchers have long been interested in the sport because of its speed and real-tim