According to Socrates, "The unexamined life is not worth living." To any table tennis player wishing to rise in the rankings, the apothegm may be adapted to advise, "The unexamined game is not worth playing." Traditionally, this was the bailiwick of coaches, whether they be trained professionals or freelance busybodies. Any minimally competent coach will carefully observe your performance and offer specific insights on strengths, weaknesses and strategies for improvement. The game of table tennis, you must admit, has changed a great deal over the last century. Advances in technology such as sponge, anti-spin and long pips rubber have necessitated rule changes, which in turn have influenced playing strategy. Now, technology again threatens the status quo. This time, however, the innovation lies is not in the physical equipment of the game but in the analysis of how you use it. Enter Stupa Sports Analytics, an Indian startup company which promises to precisely pinpoint your ponging powers and peccadilloes. According to co-founder and CEO Megha Gambhir, technology provides analytical tools far finer-grained than the human brain can contain, let alone explain. "Table tennis is a high-speed game, involving intense spin and rapid exchange of balls, therefore its complex to analyze," she says. "Our revolutionary product, a first of its kind in the world of table tennis, captures data from matches and training, extrapolates it, to provide analysis and inferences in an interactive manner." Rather than being the first step toward our enslavement by machines of our own creation, this cutting-edge computer science exists solely for the benefit of the sporting world, says Gambhir. "By deploying next-gen technology, Artificial Intelligence, we are targeting to provide real-time data and statistical analysis to players [and] coaches, providing them with a new window to delve deeper into their game," she assures us. USA Table Tennis (USATT) CEO Virginia Sung is on board, having just announced a partnership with STUPA for the benefit of the US national table tennis team. "Stupa’s tool is very effective and provides data driven insights to the players and coaches," says Sung. "Their upcoming Artificial intelligence model will certainly bring a change the way Table Tennis is coached, played and viewed." According to former national Indian team coach and Stupa Sports Analytics COO Deepak Malik, AI-driven video analysis has been the secret weapon behind his nation's recent rise. The secret, however, was simply too good to keep. "We have experienced the power of this product practically as we saw a transformative change in the game of some leading Indian players who used it," says Malik. "A lot of games like cricket [and] tennis have products which provide deeper insights, but table tennis still relied on the manual method. That is about to change." Soon, all professional players and many ambitious amateurs will seek the data-driven insights offered by video analysis. With the power to scientifically examine your game, insights are inevitable and progress is probable. Even Socrates would toast to that.

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