A little misleading. The title makes it seem like the robot learnt to write these unknown langauges but it looks like it was shown an image and was able to reproduce what was on the image, even though some of the writing was not in its training domain. Pre-LLMs so still pretty neat, just less impressive than the title suggests.

It doesn't seem to me like they trained it to write Japanese characters, but more broadly to reproduce a drawing or pencil strokes, so I don't think it is extremely surprising.

"Their learning system is split into two distinct models. A “local” model is in charge of what’s going on with the current stroke of the pen—so aiming in the right direction and determining how to end the stroke. And a “global” model is in charge of moving the robot’s writing utensil to the next stroke of the character."

They really missed an opportunity to use Chinese, and have the robot be in a hotel room.

(2019) Paper page: https://www.atsunobukotani.com/robotdrawing

Robot taught to draw glyphs can draw glyphs

Incredible how much higher the bar is only seven years later

So? A photocopier can do that.