‘To become a proficient table tennis player, humans require excellent hand-eye coordination, the ability to move rapidly and make quick decisions reacting to their opponent—all of which are significant challenges for robots. Google DeepMind’s researchers used a two-part approach to train the system to mimic these abilities: they used computer simulations to train the system to master its hitting skills; then fine tuned it using real-world data, which allows it to improve over time.’