AI learns how to dribble a basketball

Dribbling a basketball looks deceptively easy. In truth, it takes years of hard work to achieve effortless motion across the court, and, as it turns out, at least as long for developers to model those skills in computer simulations. But a new approach involving artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to speed things up a bit — at least in the case of developers.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and DeepMotion, a California-based “motion intelligence” startup founded in 2014, have developed a physics-based system that learns dribbling skills from basketball players’ real-life movements.