Sony AI has published research in Nature introducing Ace, a robot that becomes the first to defeat elite human players in a competitive physical sport. Ace combines event-based vision sensors with model-free reinforcement learning and high-speed hardware. In official matches under ITTF regulations, Ace won three of five matches against elite players and later beat professional players in follow-up matches. The robot achieved over 75% return rate on spins up to 450 rad/s and demonstrated the ability to generalize to rare, hard-to-simulate situations like balls bouncing off the net.
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