Sony AI Project Ace robot defeats professional table tennis experts - Technetbook

Sony's Project Ace robot has apparently bested some top university and professional table tennis players, which would be mildly impressive if we hadn't watched this exact film before. Remember when DeepMind's AlphaGo vanquished Go champions and we collectively agreed that bespoke game-playing AIs are marvellous press releases but tell us precisely nothing about whether the damn thing can butter toast or fold laundry without committing violence upon the cutlery drawer? According to Technetbook, the robot 'uses advanced perception to track ball movement and assess spin angles' — essentially, it has been hyper-specialised within an inch of its servos for one narrow task on a fixed-dimension table with known bounce physics. Far be it from me to spoil Sony's victory lap, but beating a ping-pong player in a controlled lab environment is to general intelligence as being able to recite the entire Yellow Pages from memory is to writing a bestselling novel; lightly related via the concept of 'learning,' perhaps, but missing rather crucial elements like_context_ and any application beyond the precisely choreographed demo. Still, it's certainly cheaper than the £250 we spent on that AI-powered ping-pong trainer from EnterTech back in January, so there's that faint shred of upside.