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Very cool, but "Our approach lead to competitive play at human level and a robot agent that humans actually enjoy playing with": I would not call that remotely

Very cool, but "Our approach lead to competitive play at human level and a robot agent that humans actually enjoy playing with": I would not call that remotely near "human level" yet. I think we'll get there at some point but I think people underestimate how difficult table tennis is and the level of top human play is insane. This was the World Cup match point recently for reference: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-AJg2u7U5MU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-AJg2u7U5MU As a little side project I'm working on a table tennis AI for VR which works by imitating real players, which is a much simpler problem since you're allowed to "fake" a lot of things in a game. I think VR holds more promise in the short to medium term for practicing TT than robotics.

hyperbrainer 1y ago
Most table tennis players don't play at the level of the World Cup.
- artofpongfu 1y ago
  Yeah, but I don't think anyone who's played TT regularly would call this "intermediate". It's like calling someone who managed to code fizzbuzz an intermediate programmer.
  - yusina 1y ago
    Exactly this. A world-class player could beat this thing left-handed with one eye closed.
    - artofpongfu 1y ago
      Left-handed, one one leg, one eye closed and a mobile phone instead of a racket. Reminds me of a clip of Truls Moregardh playing a reporter with a phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EJaT1b8QmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EJaT1b8QmA
  - kerkeslager 1y ago
    To be honest this feels a bit pedantic to me. "Intermediate" is a pretty vague word and unless there's some official rankings termed "intermediate" I'm unaware of, the authors of this paper are fine to apply it as they see fit. There are a significant number of players worse than the robot, and a significant number of players better. That's fact, and that's all "intermediate" means.
dmurray 1y ago
It's exactly at the level I thought was communicated by the title and introduction. "Human level competitive", "solidly amateur-level human performance", "beat 100% of beginners and 55% of intermediate players". That robot would definitely win some games in your local club league, except that it doesn't serve, and unless it's cheating in ways the announcement glosses over like extra cameras - DeepMind have some history here so I reserve the right to be skeptical. The only thing I'd take issue with in the abstract is "Table tennis... requires human players to undergo years of training to achieve an advanced level of proficiency." While that sentence is true, it's irrelevant to this robot since this robot only plays at intermediate proficiency, a level reachable by a moderately athletic human with some practice. By contrast, the AlphaGo [0] AlphaZero [1] and AlphaStar [2] papers claim "mastery", "superhuman", "world champion level", "Grandmaster-level", "human professional" ability - all defensible claims given their performance and match conditions in the respective games. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292074166_Mastering_the_game_of_Go_with_deep_neural_networks_and_tree_search https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292074166_Mastering... [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- artofpongfu 1y ago
  I could concede it as "lower intermediate", but the span is huge. I don't think it can beat an upper beginner consistently. It all depends on what ELO you consider intermediate.
- yusina 1y ago
  > That robot would definitely win some games in your local club league Definitely not. If you go beyond the cherry-picked videos where some longer sequences happened, the longer match videos reveal how bad the robot is. It makes really bad mistakes and loses most points against players not even on intermediate player in any local club.
  - 1y ago

hyperbrainer 1y ago

Most table tennis players don't play at the level of the World Cup.

artofpongfu 1y ago
Yeah, but I don't think anyone who's played TT regularly would call this "intermediate". It's like calling someone who managed to code fizzbuzz an intermediate programmer.
- yusina 1y ago
  Exactly this. A world-class player could beat this thing left-handed with one eye closed.
  - artofpongfu 1y ago
    Left-handed, one one leg, one eye closed and a mobile phone instead of a racket. Reminds me of a clip of Truls Moregardh playing a reporter with a phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EJaT1b8QmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EJaT1b8QmA
- kerkeslager 1y ago
  To be honest this feels a bit pedantic to me. "Intermediate" is a pretty vague word and unless there's some official rankings termed "intermediate" I'm unaware of, the authors of this paper are fine to apply it as they see fit. There are a significant number of players worse than the robot, and a significant number of players better. That's fact, and that's all "intermediate" means.

dmurray 1y ago

It's exactly at the level I thought was communicated by the title and introduction. "Human level competitive", "solidly amateur-level human performance", "beat 100% of beginners and 55% of intermediate players". That robot would definitely win some games in your local club league, except that it doesn't serve, and unless it's cheating in ways the announcement glosses over like extra cameras - DeepMind have some history here so I reserve the right to be skeptical. The only thing I'd take issue with in the abstract is "Table tennis... requires human players to undergo years of training to achieve an advanced level of proficiency." While that sentence is true, it's irrelevant to this robot since this robot only plays at intermediate proficiency, a level reachable by a moderately athletic human with some practice. By contrast, the AlphaGo [0] AlphaZero [1] and AlphaStar [2] papers claim "mastery", "superhuman", "world champion level", "Grandmaster-level", "human professional" ability - all defensible claims given their performance and match conditions in the respective games. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292074166_Mastering_the_game_of_Go_with_deep_neural_networks_and_tree_search https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292074166_Mastering... [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
artofpongfu 1y ago
I could concede it as "lower intermediate", but the span is huge. I don't think it can beat an upper beginner consistently. It all depends on what ELO you consider intermediate.
yusina 1y ago
> That robot would definitely win some games in your local club league Definitely not. If you go beyond the cherry-picked videos where some longer sequences happened, the longer match videos reveal how bad the robot is. It makes really bad mistakes and loses most points against players not even on intermediate player in any local club.
- 1y ago