If you are given the opportunity to fear AI-powered robots replacing human workers in physically demanding jobs, consider this your trigger’s warning.
A robotic arm built by Sony, and named Ace, has been dubbed “the first autonomous system to compete with table tennis players.” That’s a quote from read distributed throughout front page of Naturethe most respected peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Ace researchers brought the receipt. As you can see in the video above, the eight-joint robotic arm can make split-second decisions through AI fed real-time data from nine cameras. Scored a lot of points and won a few games against some of the world’s top ping-pong players at Sony Headquarters in Tokyo.
But here’s the good news buried in all the data. Yes, within the confines of this study, Ace had competition. That doesn’t mean Ace can always figure out how to win; it’s nothing like a robot running a half marathon that only has to control one speed. And, more importantly, the human players began to see the flaws in Ace’s ping-pong strategy.
Ace is not the first robot to play ping-pong. Researchers have long been interested in the game because of its speed and real-time decisions, which are the main frontiers of robotics. In this regard, the Ace marks an important step for an AI system and for a highly reliable handheld.
The hand was able to track a ping pong ball with 10 milliseconds of latency – more than 10 times faster than the human brain can manage.
Mashable Light Speed
“Ace’s impressive skills are fully trained in simulation using reinforcement learning, then transferred directly to the real robot,” Sony explained in a blog post. “This is similar to a player practicing endlessly in an online gym and then going to the real arena without having to relearn anything.”
Human players fight
But that’s the only thing – ping-pong players learn on the go, and they look beyond the ball.
Mayuka Taira, who lost a match to Ace last December, told Sony that the robot scared her at first. “Because you can’t read his reactions, it’s impossible to know what kind of shots he doesn’t like or struggles with, and that makes it harder to play against him,” he said.
But Rui Takenaka, who has lost and won against Ace, went further than that important human step. Here’s what he told the company, emphasizing ours:
If I used a serve with complex spin, Ace also returned the ball with complex spin, which made it difficult for me. Butwhen I used a simple serve, what we call a wrist, Ace returned the ball much easier. That made it easier for me to attack with the third shot, and I think that was the main reason why I was able to win.
Do you understand that? Ace, a very smart system, was absorbed by the wrist.
“Professional human athletes are very good at adapting to their opponent and finding weaknesses, which is an area we work on,” said Ace project leader Peter Dürr. he told Reuters.
So we shouldn’t hang up our ping pong rackets just yet. But we should definitely be very concerned about the mention of security requests through various reports and blogs about Ace.
Because the biggest real-world use of fast systems like this isn’t in the Olympics. It is on the battlefield – where being faster than the human eye can mean game over for a human soldier.
