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 ?
Marching humanoid terminator robots will never be as cheap as a drone. Autonomous suicide drone swarms are what should terrify you.
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!
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
The more important fact is that China makes all the drones
If you believe them.
> 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.
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.
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
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-position-take...
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.
Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
> 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.
Settled how? Tabs win, right?
go fmt
Ping Pong is what you play for fun in the basement. The competitive sport is Table Tennis.
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)
Lmao the character used is so cute
It's ping pong.
According to this video it can read the spin:
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.
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.
I can't parse that sentence, can you please clarify?
Apologies! I left a much clearer edit on screen, and when I noticed I had not commited it, the edit window had closed.
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
Thanks!
It’s miniature table pickleball.
> Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
Is it also MOVING STAIRCASE, NOT ESCALATOR?
The ball trajectory gives the spin
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
Finally an AI that takes someone's job and nobody's upset about it.
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."
I used to love Mitch Hedberg. I still do, but I used to, too.
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
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.
Put up in a place
where it is easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T
¨
slowly you climb
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time
-- Piet Hein
If you don't like a parade, run in the opposite direction to fast-forward it.
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.
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.
> Clankers play hockey against eachother at a Clanker Olympics
Well actually hockey in particular could be entertaining, depending on how they play.
Robocops vs Terminators maybe
The official Sony AI video, which is really interesting and has some glorious footage: https://youtu.be/FrGq8ltb-_E?si=PWm1Dv0T9UHUFw0t
More details and videos at https://ace.ai.sony/
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
I'll be impressed when it's a humanoid robot that has to contend with similar kinematic limitations as a human player.
Here is the paper:
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.
quite surprised to see SAC, considering the deepmind ping pong paper resorted to evolutionary strategies, iirc
Nature video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
Makes sense that it would.
Reminds me of this old The Onion story: https://theonion.com/ping-pong-somehow-elicits-macho-posturi...
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.
The motion system constrains the problem quite a bit. This video of high speed vision/actuators is 16 years old - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdHY26E2jc
I was expecting/hoping for a humanoid robot.
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?
Yes, using nine specialized cameras. Still very impressive but the human is overmatched on equipment alone.
What happens when two of them play each other?
How easy is it to introduce artifacts that reduce accuracy and performance?
Well, I guess we’re going to fire all the Ping-pong players at the office and replace them with these robots.
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.
It's an amazing feat of engineering because it requires constant micro-adjustments, something that robots couldn't do a few years ago.
Coming soon to an ICE Goon Squad near you!
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.
isn't this a technology forum?
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.
I wonder if a top player with access to a robot like this can get an extra edge in training?
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.
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
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005)
(Linking that one as it's the first in which any of the teams completed the entire course)
Absolutely love this idea, it sounds very fun
robot ping pong league
It would be a good benchmark for humanoid robots
> 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?
> Yep!
The greatest blernsball player was a machine for playing blernsball.
Now we need to find out if the robot can win against the wall
AI gets all the fun jobs. Yet again.
Now build a robot that can catch a bullet.
careful what you wish for.