> that reaches amateur human-level performance in competitive table tennis
How are we defining amateur here? The presented video shows the human intentionally volleying with the robot, barely putting any force at all behind the returns. But it says the robot won 55% of matches against intermediate players? That requires being able to return much harder shots than shown.
They note that the robot achieved an "intermediate" skill level. This has been determined by letting it play matches against people of different skill levels as determined by a professional table tennis coach. The "Results" section explains this.
Google had a very competitive employee ping pong league and one of the coaches was on the USA Olympic team, I doubt they would lie about ping pong skills
Googlers are well known for speaking up when they disagree with something the company is doing, but yeah I mostly wanted to call out how big the ping pong culture is at Google at least in Mountain View
But they don't explain what metrics they use to differentiate skill level other than waving the hands of a puppet coach. The arm control is great but they don't show it returning non-softballs. Is that what "intermediate" means?
Probably, if you consider that a beginner can rarely volley at all. At an intermediate level, a fast return pretty much just wins the point, when it doesn't hit the net or miss the table.
How are we defining amateur here? The presented video shows the human intentionally volleying with the robot, barely putting any force at all behind the returns. But it says the robot won 55% of matches against intermediate players? That requires being able to return much harder shots than shown.