My brother and I used to have it as kids, eventually you figure out shortcuts, and go faster and faster.
But we discovered by mistake (or rather while expressing frustration) that the quickest route ends up being a very sudden lift of the left corner, sending the ball flying above the whole board, and directly into the last hole.
With practice, you get down to one second to get to the left corner, then a second and a half to get it airborne, and for it to fly into the finish line.
I have no doubt the AI will figure it out, and probably even make it faster.
I'm surprised no one did this maze thing earlier, seems like an obvious idea with high probability of success. And it doesn't even require much in terms of hardware.
There was also this PR stunt by Kuka, a German manufacturer of industrial robots, that challanged famous player Timo Boll in table tennis. This was almost ten years ago, not sure how it ended, to be honest.
I'm thinking one reason why human players do this more slowly and careful is that they'd get annoyed by the repetitiveness of having to start over many times and therefore adopt a more conservative strategy. Getting annoyes is of course a problem that AIs don't have.
