Billiards is a fun sport because anyone can play it, even if you’ve had a couple of drinks. It is entertaining and fun to play when you bet your friends for a little extra money and play money. But before you get too cocky, there might be a new kid on the block, and “it” might be a lot harder to beat than the friends you’ve been playing with at the local pool hall.
There was a great article on NewScientist TV, along with a video titled; “Born to Be Viral: Pool-Playing Robot Rivals Humans,” which appeared on June 9, 2011, and had articles all over the science news circuit. The article says;
“Pool sharks, beware: a new robot will give you a run for your money. He’s definitely not the fastest player, but he did complete 400 shots with an 80 percent success rate with two arms that can move seven different ways. Cameras mounted above the table track the position of the balls and cue, and send this information to the robot’s computers.It decides the best move, calculates bearing, and shoots.To get into position, it rolls around the table using coordinates default”.
On the MIT Technology Review blog network on the MIMS blog, another article was published on June 11, 2011 titled; “How Robots Will Beat Humans at Pool” by Christopher Mims, where he writes;
“Pool makes chess and Jeopardy look like child’s play, all the more reason to develop new technologies and further humiliate the human race by tackling this unique computational challenge.”
Watching this robotic system play, he seems to have very little trouble hitting direct shots. His accuracy isn’t 100% on bench shots against the wall, but he’s close and better than me. Maybe not better than a professional player, but he sure can compete against anyone in any of the pool halls I’ve been to. This new device could work quite well for pool hall owners, allowing humans to challenge it and perhaps win a prize if they can beat it. Right now he has his own software, and he doesn’t have artificial intelligence, so he doesn’t get better the more he plays, he always plays at the same level.
However, I hope that AI will be added to this unit in the future, and that it will be extremely difficult to beat by buffing after every miss or win, honing its ultimate accuracy. The fact that you can do these calculations so easily and repeat them, as if it were nothing more than a simple task, is a bit disconcerting to anyone who has tried to master the game. However, this is the future that we will see in the future.
In fact, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more pool robots in sci-fi movies. This robot looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s current technology, it exists, and it’s pretty cool. It’s real, it’s a photo trick, or some ambitious project to make a viral video. In fact, I hope you go on YouTube and look it up, and see what you think. It looks like something that would be great to practice and improve your billiards skills with. Please consider all this and think about it.