The other day, I was talking to an acquaintance about their incredible ability to play table tennis, as they had played for over 30 years. They seem to be so well adapted, that they could probably play blindfolded, as they played the game almost like a reflex. Now you may say this is impossible, but consider some of the things that you are very good at doing, you can practically do them in your sleep.
Let's discuss this, and here is a question; could you play to games of tabletop tennis back-to-back, no, I don't mean one after the other, I mean literally back-to-back where you would be playing one opponent, and then have to turn around and play a different opponent simultaneously. You could listen for the shot behind you as you hit the shot ahead of you, and then turn, and know approximately where it would be to return that shot as well. If you could synchronize your play, you would always have time to turnaround, as the opponents would not be firing at the same time.
Okay so, we can probably design a computer algorithm using artificial intelligence and robotics to create a system which could do this, whereas only the top table tennis players in the world that are human could attempt this and achieve any sort of success. Let me take this one step further. What if we took a 130 tables, each one slightly offset by 3-degrees, not enough to be very noticeable, but enough to make a full circle. Each one of the players would be playing back-to-back in this circular configuration. Is it possible to keep the game going using a computer program and robotic players?
Is it possible to keep the game going if we used the top table tennis human players in the world? Now then, how would I go about creating such a computer program? Well, it turns out that Battelle Corporation in Washington State had done studies with traffic jams where the 10 or more cars flowing around in a large circle. It turns out that even if all the drivers followed each other at the same rate of speed, eventually their reaction time and breaking, would bottleneck on one side of the circle. However, I think that we have had enough practice with computational computer science and tricky algorithms to solve this problem using the Google autonomous car, or a group of 10 or more of them.
Therefore, in this musical chair table tennis trick, it is my belief that the humans would eventually fail, but we could indeed design artificial intelligent robotic computer systems to achieve this lofty challenge. Okay so, I hope you will please consider all this and think on it not only from a computational theoretical standpoint, but also from a philosophical one because if we can solve that problem, I do believe there are applications which are endless in many domains of the human endeavor.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on the Science of Sports. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/
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