French tennis star Jo-Wilfried Tsonga is preparing to play against a
robot. Surprisingly, it's not Roger Federer, renowned for his
robotically stiff commercial acting and machine-like winning ways
(including those 17 Grand Slam singles titles). Today at 11 a.m. ET, at a
practice session for the French Open, Tsonga will take on an actual
automaton, which will try to hit shots past the world's eighth-ranked
player based on tweets supplied by fans as part of a promotion for
banking giant BNP Paribas (and agency We Are Social).
Fans visiting the Tweet & Shoot site
can log in with Twitter and drag and drop tennis-ball icons to set up
virtual shots, which are then encoded as hashtagged tweets which the
on-court bionic Borg will decipher—and then spit out a real ball for
Tsonga to hit. Users are also encouraged to include messages of
encouragement to Jo-Wilfried, who has never won a Grand Slam event.
Forty fans chosen by BNP's social communities are guaranteed to have
their shots included at Tsonga's session with the robot. The rest will
be picked at random from among the tweets. Folks with no lives
whatsoever can check out Tweet & Shoot's streaming coverage of the
event at the link above. Maybe the bot will blow a fuse, leap over the
net and swat Tsonga like a fly.
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