Google DeepMind can beat humans at table tennis [Video]

Google’s DeepMind can control a robotic arm to beat mere mortals at table tennis, a new study reports. But Fan Zhendong, the 2024 gold medalist for individual and team men’s table tennis, can rest easy: The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered robot could only beat mediocre players, and only some of the time, according to the study, which was published Aug. 7 to the preprint database arXiv and has not been peer-reviewed.

Robots can now cook, clean and perform acrobatics, but they struggle to quickly respond to real-world environmental information.

“Achieving human-level performance in terms of accuracy, speed and generality still remains a grand challenge in many domains,” the researchers wrote in the study.

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To overcome this limitation, the researchers combined an industrial robot arm with a customized version of DeepMind’s ultrapowerful learning algorithm. DeepMinduses neural networks, a layered architecture that mimics how …