A year ago this [0] table tennis robot backed by Google DeepMind was discussed on HN.
It plays much worse and the HN discussion is anchored around whether it's OK to call it "human-level" or if the authors should have clarified that they meant a human who doesn't actually play table tennis. But it was accepted as being SOTA at that time.
What happened since then? This looks like the kind of level of advance we see in, say, coding AIs, but I thought physical robotics was advancing much more slowly.
A partial answer is that the new robot cheats in ways that DeepMind didn't seem to. It has high speed cameras all over the room and can detect spin by observing the logo on the ball. But I'm not sure this explains such a big advance.
As a human player (of a not-high standard) I cannot see the spin of the ball directly. I can only infer it from the movement of my opponents bat. So I would wonder that a camera could pick it up in real time.
I had a look at Google trends for France. Table tennis is slightly more common than ping pong but the latter is much more stable. Table tennis has huge peaks, the biggest one being during the OG in Paris. These parks are not reflected in there ping pong trend
Interestingly, for Youtube searches this is the other way, with a much bigger difference in favour to ping pong
neosat•Apr 22, 2026
As a player myself, and having seen much higher level player than me, reading the spin from the ball rotation (and in fact trajectory) of the ball is a common (if advanced) skill. Sometimes the movement of the bat can be deceptive (since with the same movement, where it contact on the bat, the finger pressure can affect the spin).
For example, backspin/underspin balls will move slower after the first bounce and feel 'damper' while topspin will jump. So it's def. possible (and in fact reliable) to read the spin from the spin and trajectory of the ball.
QuantumGood•Apr 22, 2026
Visually reading spin is unreliable at all levels; the ITTF passed the two-color rubber rule requiring one black and one red side to neutralize players taking advantage of their opponents being unable to read the spin from watching the ball rotation via twiddling rackets with the same color rubber on both sides, but different characteristics.
stavros•Apr 23, 2026
I can't parse that sentence, can you please clarify?
thatguy0900•Apr 23, 2026
Ping pong paddles have two sides, with different characteristics for each side. Now the two sides have to have different colors so your opponent can see what you are hitting it with, where before you could use the same color on both sides and your opponent wouldn't be able to tell how the ball would react
stavros•Apr 23, 2026
Thanks!
QuantumGood•Apr 23, 2026
Apologies! I left a much clearer edit on screen, and when I noticed I had not commited it, the edit window had closed.
davebren•Apr 22, 2026
The ball trajectory gives the spin
dataflow•Apr 22, 2026
> Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
Is it also MOVING STAIRCASE, NOT ESCALATOR?
throwup238•Apr 22, 2026
> Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
Alas HN has finally found its next religious war!
I’ve been feeling a little bored after that whole tabs vs spaces one was settled.
user3939382•Apr 23, 2026
Settled how? Tabs win, right?
scythe•Apr 23, 2026
go fmt
antonvs•Apr 23, 2026
Luckily Go is only used by people looking for a typed version of Python.
Filligree•Apr 23, 2026
I refuse. My code will be formatted according to my own preferences.
drfloyd51•Apr 23, 2026
Imagine a world where your editor shows you what you want to see… but saves in a standard format for sharing.
bombcar•Apr 22, 2026
It’s miniature table pickleball.
paolovictor•Apr 23, 2026
To be honest, if Chinese folks are fine with calling it "ping pong" (乒乓), I'm fine, too.
(Also, you sorta can infer the spin from the ball arc or even if you catch a glimpse of the rotating label)
mcmoor•Apr 23, 2026
Lmao the character used is so cute
Foobar8568•Apr 23, 2026
In french, we call that ping pong too. So yeah for ping pong.
pil0u•Apr 23, 2026
That is simply not true. We call it "tennis de table" when it comes to the sport, and we call it "ping pong" when you play at a camping in flip flops.
hermitcrab•Apr 23, 2026
>even if you catch a glimpse of the rotating label
Some people say they can see the spin from the rotating logo. I can't.
segmondy•Apr 23, 2026
It's ping pong.
thenthenthen•Apr 23, 2026
It is ping pang if you use standard pinyin. Also, all these fancy cameras, I wonder if they considered using sound as well? I am a super noob fE player but sound hints are pretty telling of the speed and where and how the ball was hit
james_marks•Apr 23, 2026
Ping Pong is what you play for fun in the basement. The competitive sport is Table Tennis.
4gotunameagain•Apr 23, 2026
This is like software developers who write javascript wanting to be called engineers, isn't it
ReptileMan•Apr 23, 2026
Vibe code
avadodin•Apr 23, 2026
Erm, excuse me?
The professional engineering language is called TypeScript.
JavaScript is what you use to add popups to your GeoCities WebSite.
antonvs•Apr 23, 2026
> professional engineering language
> TypeScript
rofl
drfloyd51•Apr 23, 2026
lol all you want. I’ve got 5 people on my team buying food and housing for their families with typescript skills.
jamesjyu•Apr 23, 2026
It was actually called ping pong until it became a trademark dispute, and the sport had to call it table tennis!
zhouzhao•Apr 23, 2026
It's pīngpāng.
redleader55•Apr 23, 2026
乒乓. I don't know how it could be more clear that it's not "table tennis".
Steve44•Apr 23, 2026
> Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
We can also add Whiff Waff to the alternative names!
amandle•Apr 22, 2026
Reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke: "The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall."
_doctor_love•Apr 22, 2026
I used to love Mitch Hedberg. I still do, but I used to, too.
EGreg•Apr 22, 2026
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, May 7 1840.
When he was a little boy he never played out in the streets of Votkinsk like the other little children of Votkinsk, because when Tchaikovsky was one month old, his parents moved to St. Petersburg.
— Victor Borge
_doctor_love•Apr 22, 2026
Put up in a place
where it is easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T
¨
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time
-- Piet Hein
mjcohen•Apr 23, 2026
As Victor said, his parents were very upset when they came home and found him in front of a roaring fire, because they did not have a fireplace.
jimt1234•Apr 22, 2026
If you don't like a parade, run in the opposite direction to fast-forward it.
halfnhalf•Apr 22, 2026
Don't table tennis players learn to predict how the ball will act based on their opponents movements? Seems like if they aren't able to do that with a robot opponent (who doesn't look or behave like a human) then they wouldn't be able to play at their best.
ACCount37•Apr 22, 2026
I do expect this to have a "novelty edge" over human opponents - which can be closed with practice, on the human end.
And, like many AIs, it can have "jagged capability" gaps, with inhuman failure modes living in them - which humans can learn to exploit, but the robot wouldn't adapt to their exploitation because it doesn't learn continuously. Happened with various types of ML AIs designed to fight humans.
zingar•Apr 22, 2026
Chess players learned to exploit chess computers’ weaknesses in the beginning too, but they can’t any longer. This version of the robot might not learn continuously, but the next will be better.
cool_dude85•Apr 23, 2026
I believe there are still some echoes of the concept. Even top engines will play certain grandmaster draw lines unless told more or less explicitly not to. So if you were playing a match against Stockfish you'd want to play the Berlin draw as White every time, for example.
Ferret7446•Apr 22, 2026
Only if you assume the AI can't improve. Otherwise, AI has a fundamental edge over humans in that they don't get old and die, and can be copied perfectly without an expensive retraining period
ACCount37•Apr 23, 2026
Oh, they can. They just need a human touch to actually improve.
For now. It's a work in progress.
hermitcrab•Apr 22, 2026
You can predict the movement of the ball (speed, direction, spin) based on the movement of the bat relative to the ball. What the rest of the player's body is doing is irrelevant to predicting what the ball will do - but relevant to predicting where they will be when you make the return shot.
dethos•Apr 23, 2026
The movement of the "bat" is tied to the physical limitations of the arm and the positioning of the body. Something that can't be deduced or even perceived clearly from the movements of this robot.
As I mentioned in a previous comment, it would be important to know how many weeks of preparation and training against this sort of robot the player had before the match.
LeCompteSftware•Apr 22, 2026
Yes, you're dead on:
Rui Takenaka, an elite-level player who has won and lost matches against Ace, said in comments provided by Sony AI: "When it came to my serve, if I used a serve with complex spin, Ace also returned the ball with complex spin, which made it difficult for me. But when I used a simple serve - what we call a knuckle serve - Ace returned a simpler ball. That made it easier for me to attack on the third shot, and I think that was the key reason why I was able to win."
It seems like the human players might be playing in a way that tacitly overestimates their AI opponents' intelligence and underestimates their skill. AFAIK the SOTA Go AIs are still vulnerable to certain very stupid adversarial strategies that wouldn't fool an amateur (albeit they're not something you'd come up with in normal play, more like a weird cheat code). I wonder if this could get ironed out with a bit more training against humans vs. simulation.
dethos•Apr 23, 2026
Exactly. There are cues that an opponent provides when approaching a ball that help the player prepare for and limit the range of possible responses (this happens with most racket games). With these robots, the players only find out after the ball is already coming in their direction.
I wonder how much practice these players had against the machine in the weeks leading up to the actual game. That would be significant to ensure they are playing at their pro level.
tartoran•Apr 22, 2026
Cool. Now let's see two robots play and if it's fun let it become it's own thing. Other than that, this could be used for training actual players.
jareklupinski•Apr 22, 2026
robot ping pong league
davebren•Apr 22, 2026
It would be a good benchmark for humanoid robots
jimt1234•Apr 22, 2026
I've always wished for something similar: autonomous car racing. No human drivers. No remote controls. Just program the cars before the race, and let them go. Maybe even load the cars with mild explosives so they go BOOM when they crash.
I wonder if a top player with access to a robot like this can get an extra edge in training?
hermitcrab•Apr 22, 2026
Even club level players have access to tennis table 'robots'. They fire the ball at you and collect the return in a net. You can set the speed, position and spin. They are very basic compared to this robot, but useful for training.
tantalor•Apr 22, 2026
> Now, Wireless Joe Jackson! There was a blern hitting machine.
> Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns. I mean come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but programmable bat on wheels.
> Oh? And I suppose Pitch-o-mat 5000 was just a modifier howitzer?
I would love to see a video of this thing that shows the whole table. From the paper I guess they have to light the area very brightly. But it seems like a pretty serious set up.
lucidrains•Apr 22, 2026
quite surprised to see SAC, considering the deepmind ping pong paper resorted to evolutionary strategies, iirc
metadat•Apr 22, 2026
Is there a video of this in action? Pictures are not satisfying at all!
Am I correct in my understanding that- they had specialized software that not only tracked the ball, calculated spins using the logo, and fed calculated trajectories?
fourthark•Apr 23, 2026
Yes, using nine specialized cameras. Still very impressive but the human is overmatched on equipment alone.
phtrivier•Apr 22, 2026
My biggest fear at the moment is robot armies and police forces.
Case in point : we're all expecting China needs to invade Taiwan soon, or they will run out of soldiers because of the one child policies of the 70s/80s.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is holding up against a "modern" army with quickly assembled drones.
So it all seems a bit like "they'll never put tanks through the Ardennes", sort of ?
Where and when will the first invasion of a country by a purely remote controlled, AI assisted army take place ?
Will robot battalions embed civilians to act as human shields ? Will the AI learn to mistreat the locals to maintain fear, or will they see it as a needless distraction and rush to the center of powers ?
If war is mostly played out from a disrance, will years of playing RTS give South Korea an edge ?
markus_zhang•Apr 22, 2026
I don't think Russian army is very modern -- but maybe that's the reason of your quotation marks.
I kinda think that the competitions among the big dogs (US/Russia/China/etc.) would eventually green light ANY AI/Robots projects if they can justify tipping the scale somehow, and in the process completely destroys the last element of any political counter-weight. Because "fear gives men wings".
I would really hate to live in a dystopian world worse than what is described in the books/movies.
kibwen•Apr 22, 2026
Marching humanoid terminator robots will never be as cheap as a drone. Autonomous suicide drone swarms are what should terrify you.
trhway•Apr 22, 2026
Autonomous suicide drone swarms are easily countered by autonomous interceptor swarms.
>Marching humanoid terminator robots
ground bots, not necessarily marching, do have their value. They can have bulletproof armor, while still be relatively lightweight and small and fast. They can easily carry even 20-25mm autocannon - very destructive weapon, sometimes can even succeed against a real tank.
And imagine when a swarm of drones lifts a ground bot, brings and drops it right into the needed point and protects it from the enemy drones while the ground bot just destructs the things around. Synergy between different weapons system has always been the super-weapon.
DennisP•Apr 23, 2026
They can also sit in one spot guarding a position without using much battery. Ukraine recently took territory from Russian forces using ground bots, the first time it's been done without using soldiers on the ground. Now they're starting to scale the bots up to mass production.
trhway•Apr 23, 2026
the issue is remote control. Ground position means a lot of obstacles in addition to the widespread jamming. One can try to control the bot from the fiber-optic controlled drone hanging over, yet such complication has its own drawbacks. That means that ground bots are in real need of making them autonomous.
Gud•Apr 23, 2026
They don’t need to be remotely controlled anymore! Autonomous!
throw4847285•Apr 22, 2026
You say that now, but once we perfect AMBAC technology and accidentally release large numbers of Minovsky particles, we will need humanoid combat vehicles to fight our battles!
antonvs•Apr 23, 2026
> Minovsky particles
I love the way these things always have to have names that sound exotic or menacing to English speakers. Where are the Smith particles or the Jim particles?
Terr_•Apr 22, 2026
Or they might decide to, er, pre-deliver the payloads.
"Citizen, congratulations on reaching your age of majority. Report for your Patriotic Assurance Implant at surgical bay 43B."
SecretDreams•Apr 23, 2026
> Marching humanoid terminator robots will never be as cheap as a drone. Autonomous suicide drone swarms are what should terrify you.
If money or economics were relevant in these decisions, most wars would probably not play out in the first place. Tesla probably wouldn't be worth 1.2T. And we certainly wouldn't see AI buildouts happening at their current rates.
Economics and costs only matter for normal humans, small countries, and efforts that might actually help humanity. They're not seemingly considerations in nefarious applications.
DennisP•Apr 23, 2026
It matters quite a bit. If your drone costs $1000, you can build a thousand times more of them than if a drone costs $1M. As the saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own.
This is a lesson the US has yet to learn, and its military drones are really expensive. Ukraine learned it by necessity, and now it's building millions of drones annually.
boothby•Apr 23, 2026
On the other hand, if Musk really flips his lid, he's one OTA away from a network of ground-delivered lithium bombs. The fear of humanoid bots is their banality: if a government or private company has a reason to build them, then the world is full of hardware with terrifying capability and questionable security.
andyjohnson0•Apr 23, 2026
I think what your parent commenter means is that, if the application is warlike or nefarious, them the money will be found. If, on the other hand, it is humanitarian, then every penny will be counted.
DennisP•Apr 23, 2026
Yes, I get that, but for whatever amount of money is found, you're better off using it more effectively. The cost of things still matters, if you want to win wars against serious adversaries.
One problem the US has had in its Iran adventure is that they're shooting down $30K drones with million dollar missiles, often several of them. Now the missile stockpiles have been depleted by 30% to 50%, depending on missile type, and they're not all that quick to replace.
kruffalon•Apr 23, 2026
> If money or economics were relevant in these decisions, most wars would probably not play out in the first place.
I don't understand what you mean here.
Aren't wars fought over natural resources or the political power over natural resources.
Obviously people sometimes miscalculate but in principle I mean.
antonvs•Apr 23, 2026
> Aren't wars fought over natural resources or the political power over natural resources.
Not really. They’re fought over fear of the future, desire for control and power over other people. “It’s us or them” captures one of the core calculi of war. It’s not rational, it’s just an expression of evolutionary imperatives.
fragmede•Apr 23, 2026
Which of those is opening doors?
4gotunameagain•Apr 23, 2026
Two drones. One to blast the door open, the next goes through.
Still more cost effective than a humanoid robot, even in the presence of hundreds of doors.
fragmede•Apr 23, 2026
That breaks the building. If you want to destroy the whole thing, conventional weapons has that covered. Drones can't get through nets and doors. Though, have you considered packs of robot dogs with machine guns and one arm/hand? Cheaper than a fully bipedal humanoid robot.
fc417fc802•Apr 23, 2026
> have you considered packs of robot dogs with machine guns
I don't have it to hand but already a few years ago a defense contractor had attached quite a heavy rifle on some sort of articulable mount to the top of something that looked exactly like Boston Dynamic's Spot. I'm not sure how much ammo it was capable of carrying or what it's range was but it's definitely a concerning development. I think I might become an enthusiastic custom anti-materiel rifle collector in the near future.
plaguuuuuu•Apr 23, 2026
I'll carry an ammo belt of little EMP devices.
antonvs•Apr 23, 2026
A microwave weapon could be effective. And reusable.
vasco•Apr 23, 2026
One thing exists and is known to work and be cheap. The other it's you musing about what will be possible. So they need to be judged differently. No land robot can move through a war environment in any effective way at the moment and also "open doors" etc. They are too slow. Not drones.
fhub•Apr 23, 2026
Not marching, but Ukraine uses continuous track machine gun robots seemingly very effectively. They aren’t suicide ones.
They are an interesting prospect but their use isn't quite as claimed.
They are extremely vulnerable to the same drones humans are.
It's more along the lines of this is a patch were not expecting active fighting this robot can act as a deterrent and surveillance.
Cheaper and simpler than a loitering IRS drone. But more concentrated in domain.
I believe for a while Samsung developed similar drones for the demilitarised zone in Korea. Those could be static as they were hard wired in.
imtringued•Apr 23, 2026
Most military grade drones cost $10k or more and they can only be used once.
An optimized quadruped could probably be built for the same price and have an integrated 60mm mortar instead. The front legs act as the bipod and the rear legs would be designed to dig into the ground for stabilization. The only problem here is reloading the mortar, which could be done using a revolver style magazine. That's 5 shots per robot vs 1 per drone.
Morromist•Apr 22, 2026
China had more births in 2025 than all of europe and russia combined so I don't think they're going to run out of soldiers.
marcus_holmes•Apr 23, 2026
The more important fact is that China makes all the drones
mjcohen•Apr 23, 2026
If you believe them.
LanceJones•Apr 23, 2026
But also more deaths. It's the delta that's important.
vasco•Apr 23, 2026
Old people don't go to war, how is that important. All that matters is who has the most 20 year olds they don't care about killing.
phtrivier•Apr 23, 2026
The births of 2025 will be the warriors of 2050. By then, a bunch of those will be needed to, you know, run things around the country.
It's clear that China is going to use tech (as in, artificial wombs, neural implants for optimized beaurocracy, and plenty of robots.)
My big question is:
- will they keep the human bodies warm to care for the elderly, and send robots to war ?
- will they keep the robots to take care of the elderly, and send the young's to war ?
- will they dispose f the elderly to keep their edge ?
- will they play long and wait things out ?
AlecSchueler•Apr 23, 2026
> China needs to invade Taiwan
> It's clear that China is going to use tech
I hear this all the time but the invasion never seems to come. Is it just western projection at this point?
thatguy0900•Apr 23, 2026
To some extent it already has, Ukraine had a press release a few days ago stating they had attacked and taken a position using only robots and drones for the first time
> If war is mostly played out from a disrance, will years of playing RTS give South Korea an edge ?
Not sure if this is serious, but RTS skills are different from real-world battlefield skills. Macro is completely different, and while micro skills might be slightly transferrable, computers are so much better that no human will ever be microing real units on a real battlefield.
dyauspitr•Apr 23, 2026
We are less than 5 years from robot armies. I mean if you put a person behind a Unitree robot, we have robot armies now. Those things run pretty fast and are quite good at obstacle clearance. They also cost $20,000 per unit which is throwaway money by any metric. Full autonomy is real close though.
dyauspitr•Apr 23, 2026
Russia is not a “modern” army. They are literally using low tech drones from Iran against Ukraine because they can’t come up with their own.
cik•Apr 23, 2026
> If war is mostly played out from a disrance
I left a company because they pivoted to exactly this. There are so many companies in this space today, testing what they call "physical AI autonomy" today, and we have to recognize that this is our today.
There are entire marketplace options for buying the pretrained, supported, private models, or the datasets if you have your own goals. If you're interested purely in ditzing around with GPS denied, or communications lost, you can do that today.
I watched a demo video, in March where a company was sharing their remote instructed (note, not controlled) multiple format (spider, dog) robot swarm. The company claimed to be 35km away from where the drones dropped off the payloads, and the mission was engaged. Lightweight explosives were used to toss off a car.
This is our present.
TheScaryOne•Apr 23, 2026
I can't wait for the Faro Plague and the robot dinosaurs.
danny_codes•Apr 23, 2026
Friendly fire is going to get crazy. Can’t trust an LLM on its own for more than a few iterations..
rich_sasha•Apr 23, 2026
It's going to happen and at some level I'd rather war casualties were measured in robots rather than people.
My concern is the cottage industry of integrating guns with half baked AI at the lowest cost. And probably vibe coded too.
The companies don't care - a sale is a sale. MoD maybe doesn't care - 90% accuracy and less human casualties on their own side are a win. Governments want to save money and by the time they find out the robots go rogue, it will be too late to do anything about it.
spwa4•Apr 23, 2026
The problem is always the same. It's not just MoD (is it MoW now?) that will have access to this.
YoloV8 + optical flow works fine on an esp32. You want to give a drone rough coordinates for a refinery and hit something in it, like a storage tank? That'll work. This means, give it 5 years, relatively small groups will have access to it. This cannot be stopped.
The only real answer is to work to have groups that you can trust to have access to this first.
squigz•Apr 23, 2026
> The only real answer is to work to have groups that you can trust to have access to this first.
How will this help exactly?
matwood•Apr 23, 2026
People saw Black Mirror and made a business plan out of it.
Remote controlled autonomous robots/drones can also be used for, say, elder care.
A nurse can log in to a HelperBot remotely, check up on the client, tidy up the house and maybe even give medication. Instead of having to drive around between clients, losing maybe hours a day just on transit, one person can manage more people per day.
...but the same system can be modified for KillerBot easily like we know from EVERY SCI-FI BOOK EVER.
We live in interesting times.
AussieWog93•Apr 23, 2026
Honestly that sounds dystopian even ignoring the killer robot aspect. Imagine the only "flesh and blood" human contact you have being optimised away to reduce cost by 10-20%.
theshrike79•Apr 23, 2026
[delayed]
Markoff•Apr 23, 2026
Ah geez, again this China invading Taiwan nonsense, China ain't USA, Israel or Russia attacking sovereign countries, they just use money to take over, they will do exactly same with Taiwan. Eventually Taiwanese people will figure out that siding with agressive country run by crazy old men is worse option than siding with China.
China has all time in the world not being run by crazies with 5 year election terms rushing to keep their mark in the history, not necessarily positive...
vachina•Apr 23, 2026
Yeah pretty much Americans are projecting themselves when they talk about China invading other countries.
Who’s been invading and bombing other nations so far lol.
munksbeer•Apr 23, 2026
Silly Devil's Advocate argument:
What if there are no human soldiers or fighters at all? No-one needs to die in a war again, but wars are won by the side with the stronger tech.
What are the possible outcomes of this? Technologically superior countries start a race to acquire more territory, so large blocks expand and absorb other countries? More wars? Fewer wars? More suffering? Less suffering?
Disclaimer: I'm not imagining this is really possible. As long as some humans from group A don't want to be under the rule of group B, humans will resist and fight. But it is just a thought experiement.
altmanaltman•Apr 23, 2026
I mean if a technological superior country start a race for more territory, we will have another world war and nuclear weapons fired. No robots matter in that scenario.
justacrow•Apr 23, 2026
Philip K Dick wrote a short story similar to this, "The Defenders".
grey-area•Apr 23, 2026
All war tends toward total war, so that will never happen no. The incentive to break any such agreements is too strong.
DrScientist•Apr 23, 2026
Not sure China actually needs to invade Taiwan - it just needs to be patient. cf Hong Kong.
Totally agree with you about the dangers of autonomous killing machines - I think the two key problems here are.
1. Reduces the political cost of going to war. Though as Iran has shown, there are other ways to exert political pressure even if the other military can hit you with almost impunity.
2. This is really a follow on from the first - low cost ( in all meanings of the word ) weapons makes asymmetric warfare available to all - and this won't be limited to governments.
On the positive side one of the potential outcomes of 2. is that countries and the world will need to operate on the principle of consent, as force will be nigh on impossible.
tasuki•Apr 23, 2026
> Not sure China actually needs to invade Taiwan - it just needs to be patient.
An interesting point. China has historically been good at being patient.
NicoJuicy•Apr 23, 2026
The answer is and always has been "nukes" unfortunately.
retrochameleon•Apr 22, 2026
I'll be impressed when it's a humanoid robot that has to contend with similar kinematic limitations as a human player.
alexose•Apr 23, 2026
Yeah, the dang thing can reach all the way to the net while standing three feet behind the table
Jailbird•Apr 23, 2026
That was my thought when watching the video. The robot is the size of a room if you count all the cameras.
It's like the pitch-o-matic 5000 from Futurama.
amelius•Apr 22, 2026
AI gets all the fun jobs. Yet again.
Now build a robot that can catch a bullet.
RijilV•Apr 22, 2026
careful what you wish for.
__patchbit__•Apr 23, 2026
SpaceX Mechzilla chopstick catch of Starship booster is up there for difficulty.
allthetime•Apr 22, 2026
Much like the robots beating half marathon records in China recently… who cares? Cake making robots can make cakes way faster than human bakers. Cars and motorcycles go faster than bicyclists. It is a boring given that purpose made machines perform the tasks they are built to perform better than humans.
jedberg•Apr 22, 2026
It's an amazing feat of engineering because it requires constant micro-adjustments, something that robots couldn't do a few years ago.
allthetime•Apr 22, 2026
Yeah, thinking through it a bit further, the real story here, aside from the mechanical engineering, is the application of AI/machine learning/computer vision processing. The advancements that have made it possible to reason about, simulate, and react to the complexities of a spinning ball in a fraction of a second are pretty cool. My gripe is mostly that this article isn't focusing on and detailing this.
throwatdem12311•Apr 23, 2026
Coming soon to an ICE Goon Squad near you!
hydrolox•Apr 22, 2026
isn't this a technology forum?
allthetime•Apr 22, 2026
The article's main focus is on the "vs. human" aspect and is light on technical details. I would love to hear specifics from the engineers behind this.
slowhadoken•Apr 22, 2026
The greatest blernsball player was a machine for playing blernsball.
Well, I guess we’re going to fire all the Ping-pong players at the office and replace them with these robots.
jmward01•Apr 22, 2026
I'm not that excited about 'x beats human at y' anymore. I am more interested in 'x beats human at made up on the spot tasks p d and q'. That is starting to happen more generically and is a bigger sign of emerging capability. We can always create something confined that will beat humans, it isn't until recently that we are starting to be able to generally beat humans at tasks.
runicelf•Apr 22, 2026
Now we need to find out if the robot can win against the wall
OisinMoran•Apr 22, 2026
This is great, I remember being sorely disappointed by the hyped up Timo Boll vs Kuka robot 12 years ago. I thought it was going to be a real match and seemed like the robot would destroy him, but ended up just being a marketing stunt and felt like a fixed fight, with no real digging into the tech or why the robot "lost". Still some cool footage: https://youtu.be/tIIJME8-au8
vova_hn2•Apr 23, 2026
While the engineering behind this achievement is really impressive, it doesn't feel that important in the grand scheme of things.
We had machines "beating" humans in physical tasks for a very long time. No one would be impressed by a car winning a running competition or a construction crane lifting more weight than an Olympic weightlifting champion.
jillesvangurp•Apr 23, 2026
The significance of ping pong is not beating humans but that it is a sport that depends on high precision, fast movement, and rapid responses. The aim of the game is to out maneuver the opponent and corner them such that they can't respond and adapt quickly enough. A robot beating a human means that it does this better, faster, and more precise. A few days ago, a bi pedal robot ran a a half marathon about eight or nine minutes faster than the fastest human can.
These are not the clumsy robots of a few years ago that could only do simple, pre-programmed tasks and had to work in fenced off areas because they had no awareness of anything around them (including fragile people) but self stabilizing, inhumanly fast running robots that can operate in any kind of environment and adapt to a wide variety of tasks. And then complete those tasks at very high precision and speed.
vultour•Apr 23, 2026
I'm sorry but none of this sounds in any way exciting or like a breakthrough. There are ASML machines that hit microscopic tin particles with a laser 50,000 times per second, but it's somehow an achievement we've managed to create a ping pong paddle that's fast enough to hit a ball? Precision robotics have been used in manufacturing for decades.
throwatdem12311•Apr 23, 2026
We’ve had chess computers better than humans for a long time now but nobody cares about that because it’s not about winning it’s about the humanity.
_carbyau_•Apr 23, 2026
And humans have mastered radio waves for communication, washing machines for washing clothes, dishwashers for dishes etc etc.
However, the point here is not that it makes a sport redundant, but that a type of observation, calculation, and movement has been achieved.
I for one hope to see this tech in action from the customer side of a teppanyaki restaurant. It won't replace the humour of a good human teppanyaki chef but maybe I'll be able to afford it....
throwatdem12311•Apr 23, 2026
I don’t care about robots being better than humans at human achievement.
Would anyone ever watch Clankers play hockey against eachother at a Clanker Olympics? The idea is absurd, I want to see humans competing because they are humans not just because they are good.
mgfist•Apr 23, 2026
> Clankers play hockey against eachother at a Clanker Olympics
Well actually hockey in particular could be entertaining, depending on how they play.
throwatdem12311•Apr 23, 2026
Robocops vs Terminators maybe
efskap•Apr 23, 2026
Furthermore, I think we care most about the context surrounding the humans.
If a txt2vid model could generate a 100% perfect video of a soccer match, perfectly rendering each blade of grass, would anyone watch it? No, because we care about the team and the stories of the players. Not just the spectacle being shown.
eunos•Apr 23, 2026
> If a txt2vid model could generate a 100% perfect video of a soccer match, perfectly rendering each blade of grass, would anyone watch it? No, because we care about the team and the stories of the players. Not just the spectacle being shown.
But AI would produce hilarious and memeable soccer matches. Those are enough to reserve your attention and waste your time.
NitpickLawyer•Apr 23, 2026
Plenty of people watch TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) livestreams. Even more watch a selection of games curated by professional analysts. Some of the games are really interesting and surface novel stuff.
fc417fc802•Apr 23, 2026
I would absolutely watch a clanker olympics if it was tightly regulated, involving fully autonomous bipedal robots that fit within a strict physical envelope putting on inhuman displays of athleticism. I'd be particularly interested in gladiatorial competitions since on top of super human athleticism blood sports have otherwise fallen out of favor due to the human cost.
Are you seriously telling me you wouldn't enjoy watching mechas going at it with greatswords? As a bonus (as suggested regarding cars by another commenter) mount explosive charges to weak points that must be defended.
aldielshala•Apr 23, 2026
Finally an AI that takes someone's job and nobody's upset about it.
> In matches detailed in the study, Ace in April 2025 won three out of five versus elite players and lost two matches against professional players, the top skill level in the sport. Sony AI said that since then Ace beat professional players in December 2025 and last month.
What exactly is an "elite" player, if it's not a professional?
Jtarii•Apr 23, 2026
Would assume the top amateur players that don't play professionally.
__patchbit__•Apr 23, 2026
Professionals play for money. Elites just do it.
arjunthazhath•Apr 23, 2026
Glad to see new kind of robots other than those cliche dog like ones....that does nothing but walk. In india its pretty much seen in every public event as a marketing gimmick.
thenthenthen•Apr 23, 2026
Is that a legal serve?
nilslindemann•Apr 23, 2026
I find Sony's work valuable. In my opinion, the primary purpose of AI is still, first and foremost, to relieve us of the physical labor we don't want to do. The next step to be taken is to create a universal basic income. Evolution will then unfold, as creative people will be able to dedicate their whole life undisturbed to the problems they deem important.
Here a video where one can actually see the robot in action:
> In my opinion, the primary purpose of AI is still, first and foremost, to relieve us of the physical labor we don't want to do.
Why only physical labour? There might be a lot of admin or thought labour (non physical) that we don't want to do either.
aslushnikov•Apr 23, 2026
I'm very surprised to see the rapid advancement in robotics these days. After all the fancy demos of Boston Dynamics and others from 10 years ago, and no real advancement beyond them, we kinda learned to treat robotics as "fancy toys".
Now, this feels to me very much like a Deep Blue moment in chess, when to everyone's surprise it won over Garry Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5. 20 years in, and no one even considers competing with chess engines.
This Ace robot won over table tennis professionals in 3 matches and lost in 2. Even the score is similar. I wonder what it'll all look like in 20 years from now.
31 Comments
It plays much worse and the HN discussion is anchored around whether it's OK to call it "human-level" or if the authors should have clarified that they meant a human who doesn't actually play table tennis. But it was accepted as being SOTA at that time.
What happened since then? This looks like the kind of level of advance we see in, say, coding AIs, but I thought physical robotics was advancing much more slowly.
A partial answer is that the new robot cheats in ways that DeepMind didn't seem to. It has high speed cameras all over the room and can detect spin by observing the logo on the ball. But I'm not sure this explains such a big advance.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43861207
Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
Interestingly, for Youtube searches this is the other way, with a much bigger difference in favour to ping pong
For example, backspin/underspin balls will move slower after the first bounce and feel 'damper' while topspin will jump. So it's def. possible (and in fact reliable) to read the spin from the spin and trajectory of the ball.
Is it also MOVING STAIRCASE, NOT ESCALATOR?
Alas HN has finally found its next religious war!
I’ve been feeling a little bored after that whole tabs vs spaces one was settled.
(Also, you sorta can infer the spin from the ball arc or even if you catch a glimpse of the rotating label)
Some people say they can see the spin from the rotating logo. I can't.
The professional engineering language is called TypeScript.
JavaScript is what you use to add popups to your GeoCities WebSite.
> TypeScript
rofl
We can also add Whiff Waff to the alternative names!
When he was a little boy he never played out in the streets of Votkinsk like the other little children of Votkinsk, because when Tchaikovsky was one month old, his parents moved to St. Petersburg.
— Victor Borge
where it is easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T
When you feel how depressinglyslowly you climb
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time
-- Piet Hein
And, like many AIs, it can have "jagged capability" gaps, with inhuman failure modes living in them - which humans can learn to exploit, but the robot wouldn't adapt to their exploitation because it doesn't learn continuously. Happened with various types of ML AIs designed to fight humans.
For now. It's a work in progress.
As I mentioned in a previous comment, it would be important to know how many weeks of preparation and training against this sort of robot the player had before the match.
I wonder how much practice these players had against the machine in the weeks leading up to the actual game. That would be significant to ensure they are playing at their pro level.
(Linking that one as it's the first in which any of the teams completed the entire course)
> Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns. I mean come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but programmable bat on wheels.
> Oh? And I suppose Pitch-o-mat 5000 was just a modifier howitzer?
> Yep!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10338-5
I would love to see a video of this thing that shows the whole table. From the paper I guess they have to light the area very brightly. But it seems like a pretty serious set up.
https://sonyresearch.github.io/ace_public/
Case in point : we're all expecting China needs to invade Taiwan soon, or they will run out of soldiers because of the one child policies of the 70s/80s.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is holding up against a "modern" army with quickly assembled drones.
So it all seems a bit like "they'll never put tanks through the Ardennes", sort of ?
Where and when will the first invasion of a country by a purely remote controlled, AI assisted army take place ?
Will robot battalions embed civilians to act as human shields ? Will the AI learn to mistreat the locals to maintain fear, or will they see it as a needless distraction and rush to the center of powers ?
If war is mostly played out from a disrance, will years of playing RTS give South Korea an edge ?
I kinda think that the competitions among the big dogs (US/Russia/China/etc.) would eventually green light ANY AI/Robots projects if they can justify tipping the scale somehow, and in the process completely destroys the last element of any political counter-weight. Because "fear gives men wings".
I would really hate to live in a dystopian world worse than what is described in the books/movies.
>Marching humanoid terminator robots
ground bots, not necessarily marching, do have their value. They can have bulletproof armor, while still be relatively lightweight and small and fast. They can easily carry even 20-25mm autocannon - very destructive weapon, sometimes can even succeed against a real tank.
And imagine when a swarm of drones lifts a ground bot, brings and drops it right into the needed point and protects it from the enemy drones while the ground bot just destructs the things around. Synergy between different weapons system has always been the super-weapon.
I love the way these things always have to have names that sound exotic or menacing to English speakers. Where are the Smith particles or the Jim particles?
"Citizen, congratulations on reaching your age of majority. Report for your Patriotic Assurance Implant at surgical bay 43B."
If money or economics were relevant in these decisions, most wars would probably not play out in the first place. Tesla probably wouldn't be worth 1.2T. And we certainly wouldn't see AI buildouts happening at their current rates.
Economics and costs only matter for normal humans, small countries, and efforts that might actually help humanity. They're not seemingly considerations in nefarious applications.
This is a lesson the US has yet to learn, and its military drones are really expensive. Ukraine learned it by necessity, and now it's building millions of drones annually.
One problem the US has had in its Iran adventure is that they're shooting down $30K drones with million dollar missiles, often several of them. Now the missile stockpiles have been depleted by 30% to 50%, depending on missile type, and they're not all that quick to replace.
I don't understand what you mean here.
Aren't wars fought over natural resources or the political power over natural resources.
Obviously people sometimes miscalculate but in principle I mean.
Not really. They’re fought over fear of the future, desire for control and power over other people. “It’s us or them” captures one of the core calculi of war. It’s not rational, it’s just an expression of evolutionary imperatives.
Still more cost effective than a humanoid robot, even in the presence of hundreds of doors.
I don't have it to hand but already a few years ago a defense contractor had attached quite a heavy rifle on some sort of articulable mount to the top of something that looked exactly like Boston Dynamic's Spot. I'm not sure how much ammo it was capable of carrying or what it's range was but it's definitely a concerning development. I think I might become an enthusiastic custom anti-materiel rifle collector in the near future.
https://archive.is/dpNsN
They are extremely vulnerable to the same drones humans are.
It's more along the lines of this is a patch were not expecting active fighting this robot can act as a deterrent and surveillance.
Cheaper and simpler than a loitering IRS drone. But more concentrated in domain.
I believe for a while Samsung developed similar drones for the demilitarised zone in Korea. Those could be static as they were hard wired in.
An optimized quadruped could probably be built for the same price and have an integrated 60mm mortar instead. The front legs act as the bipod and the rear legs would be designed to dig into the ground for stabilization. The only problem here is reloading the mortar, which could be done using a revolver style magazine. That's 5 shots per robot vs 1 per drone.
My big question is:
- will they keep the human bodies warm to care for the elderly, and send robots to war ?
- will they keep the robots to take care of the elderly, and send the young's to war ?
- will they dispose f the elderly to keep their edge ?
- will they play long and wait things out ?
> It's clear that China is going to use tech
I hear this all the time but the invasion never seems to come. Is it just western projection at this point?
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-position-take...
Not sure if this is serious, but RTS skills are different from real-world battlefield skills. Macro is completely different, and while micro skills might be slightly transferrable, computers are so much better that no human will ever be microing real units on a real battlefield.
I left a company because they pivoted to exactly this. There are so many companies in this space today, testing what they call "physical AI autonomy" today, and we have to recognize that this is our today.
There are entire marketplace options for buying the pretrained, supported, private models, or the datasets if you have your own goals. If you're interested purely in ditzing around with GPS denied, or communications lost, you can do that today.
I watched a demo video, in March where a company was sharing their remote instructed (note, not controlled) multiple format (spider, dog) robot swarm. The company claimed to be 35km away from where the drones dropped off the payloads, and the mission was engaged. Lightweight explosives were used to toss off a car.
This is our present.
My concern is the cottage industry of integrating guns with half baked AI at the lowest cost. And probably vibe coded too.
The companies don't care - a sale is a sale. MoD maybe doesn't care - 90% accuracy and less human casualties on their own side are a win. Governments want to save money and by the time they find out the robots go rogue, it will be too late to do anything about it.
YoloV8 + optical flow works fine on an esp32. You want to give a drone rough coordinates for a refinery and hit something in it, like a storage tank? That'll work. This means, give it 5 years, relatively small groups will have access to it. This cannot be stopped.
The only real answer is to work to have groups that you can trust to have access to this first.
How will this help exactly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror)
A nurse can log in to a HelperBot remotely, check up on the client, tidy up the house and maybe even give medication. Instead of having to drive around between clients, losing maybe hours a day just on transit, one person can manage more people per day.
...but the same system can be modified for KillerBot easily like we know from EVERY SCI-FI BOOK EVER.
We live in interesting times.
China has all time in the world not being run by crazies with 5 year election terms rushing to keep their mark in the history, not necessarily positive...
Who’s been invading and bombing other nations so far lol.
What if there are no human soldiers or fighters at all? No-one needs to die in a war again, but wars are won by the side with the stronger tech.
What are the possible outcomes of this? Technologically superior countries start a race to acquire more territory, so large blocks expand and absorb other countries? More wars? Fewer wars? More suffering? Less suffering?
Disclaimer: I'm not imagining this is really possible. As long as some humans from group A don't want to be under the rule of group B, humans will resist and fight. But it is just a thought experiement.
Totally agree with you about the dangers of autonomous killing machines - I think the two key problems here are.
1. Reduces the political cost of going to war. Though as Iran has shown, there are other ways to exert political pressure even if the other military can hit you with almost impunity.
2. This is really a follow on from the first - low cost ( in all meanings of the word ) weapons makes asymmetric warfare available to all - and this won't be limited to governments.
On the positive side one of the potential outcomes of 2. is that countries and the world will need to operate on the principle of consent, as force will be nigh on impossible.
An interesting point. China has historically been good at being patient.
It's like the pitch-o-matic 5000 from Futurama.
Now build a robot that can catch a bullet.
Reminds me of this old The Onion story: https://theonion.com/ping-pong-somehow-elicits-macho-posturi...
I was expecting/hoping for a humanoid robot.
How easy is it to introduce artifacts that reduce accuracy and performance?
We had machines "beating" humans in physical tasks for a very long time. No one would be impressed by a car winning a running competition or a construction crane lifting more weight than an Olympic weightlifting champion.
These are not the clumsy robots of a few years ago that could only do simple, pre-programmed tasks and had to work in fenced off areas because they had no awareness of anything around them (including fragile people) but self stabilizing, inhumanly fast running robots that can operate in any kind of environment and adapt to a wide variety of tasks. And then complete those tasks at very high precision and speed.
However, the point here is not that it makes a sport redundant, but that a type of observation, calculation, and movement has been achieved.
I for one hope to see this tech in action from the customer side of a teppanyaki restaurant. It won't replace the humour of a good human teppanyaki chef but maybe I'll be able to afford it....
Would anyone ever watch Clankers play hockey against eachother at a Clanker Olympics? The idea is absurd, I want to see humans competing because they are humans not just because they are good.
Well actually hockey in particular could be entertaining, depending on how they play.
If a txt2vid model could generate a 100% perfect video of a soccer match, perfectly rendering each blade of grass, would anyone watch it? No, because we care about the team and the stories of the players. Not just the spectacle being shown.
But AI would produce hilarious and memeable soccer matches. Those are enough to reserve your attention and waste your time.
Are you seriously telling me you wouldn't enjoy watching mechas going at it with greatswords? As a bonus (as suggested regarding cars by another commenter) mount explosive charges to weak points that must be defended.
What exactly is an "elite" player, if it's not a professional?
Here a video where one can actually see the robot in action:
https://youtu.be/lWp6XNHaWRk
Why only physical labour? There might be a lot of admin or thought labour (non physical) that we don't want to do either.
Now, this feels to me very much like a Deep Blue moment in chess, when to everyone's surprise it won over Garry Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5. 20 years in, and no one even considers competing with chess engines.
This Ace robot won over table tennis professionals in 3 matches and lost in 2. Even the score is similar. I wonder what it'll all look like in 20 years from now.