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#robot#human#more#robots#china#ball#war#https#ping#pong
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Discussion (225 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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!
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
We can also add Whiff Waff to the alternative names!
Is it also MOVING STAIRCASE, NOT ESCALATOR?
Interestingly, for Youtube searches this is the other way, with a much bigger difference in favour to ping pong
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.
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.
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.
It's like the pitch-o-matic 5000 from Futurama.
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror)
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.
Also, China is not likely to invade Taiwan any time soon. It'd be geopolitical suicide and they're currently in a very good spot geopolitically. Invading the country with the rest of the worlds chip fabs is the quickest way to lose that
Unlikely, most players postpone their service as long as possible, and majority does not play professionally again after completing it.
Ah yes, China has a track record of invading countries.
> or they will run out of soldiers because of the one child policies of the 70s/80s
As opposed to NATO countries who have a steady increase in the number of young conscripts.
> Meanwhile, Ukraine is holding up against a "modern" army with quickly assembled drones.
I don't know why you put modern in parentheses. Russia did make a mistake of not adopting cheap drones earlier in the war. But Russians were the first to use optic fiber drones resistant to electronic warfare which gave them an edge during Summer offensive last year. Ukrainians have since caught up and their allies were able to supply them with large number of drones. But both Ukraine and Russia rely primarily on drone warfare and artillery becomes less important for both sides. Which all explains the static state of this war.
Claims on Taiwan. Building fake islands in the South China Sea. Encroaching on the Siachen glacier. Attempting to rename Indian states. Port capture in poor nations through default. They have plenty of expansionist tendencies, it’s just early in the game…
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
Still more cost effective than a humanoid robot, even in the presence of hundreds of doors.
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.
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.
"Citizen, congratulations on reaching your age of majority. Report for your Patriotic Assurance Implant at surgical bay 43B."
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.
Ultimately, the side with more arms will be killing humans, soldiers and citizens of the other side. They simply wont stop at destruction of machines.
Look at Iran war - USA can bomb them without threatening themselves. Or Lebanon - Israel can bomb them with no repercussions. In both cases, weaker side has people killed. In the second one, in an astonishing rate.
I expect China to invade Taiwan, because they now know they likely can. I do not expect them to "run out of soldiers".
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?
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.
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...
What you said about them siding with China against a common aggressor makes sense. In fact they already did this against the Japanese and took a pause from their onw conflict to fight the Japanese together during WW2.
And it's also true that this "China aggression" is pure Western propaganda.
Which country has been bombing and waging a war somewhere since the inauguration. The same country that has over 700 military bases over the world. (China has 0)
"...rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air.."
Who’s been invading and bombing other nations so far lol.
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.
In the real world, right now, nurses have a set time in minutes to visit each client and if there's traffic or someone has fallen over and needs extra care, guess what? Someone else gets less time or the nurse has to work overtime, usually un(der)paid. (Sauce: have people in both sides of this equation in my immediate family)
This is why old people get shoved into care homes where they manage 20 clients with one nurse because the transit time is "across the hall". And that's how people get institutionalized, even the fit and healthy ones get demotivated, bored and stop trying. Saw this first hand when my grandmother couldn't live in the house she had lived in for half a century because she couldn't get enough support at home. It took her months to go from mostly alert and energetic to practically waiting to die.
I'd much rather have the daily care of my elder relatives managed by a remote operated bot than watch one more grandparent wither away slowly in an elderly care facility.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-position-take...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Sony AI autonomous robot Ace returns a shot back against its human opponent, table tennis player Yamato Kawamata, during a match in December 2025, as seen in this photograph released on April 22, 2026.
What exactly is an "elite" player, if it's not a professional?
https://arxiv.org/html/2504.10035v2
I was expecting/hoping for a humanoid robot.
Reminds me of this old The Onion story: https://theonion.com/ping-pong-somehow-elicits-macho-posturi...
https://sonyresearch.github.io/ace_public/
How easy is it to introduce artifacts that reduce accuracy and performance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cMc4M5QJvM
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.
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.
Well actually hockey in particular could be entertaining, depending on how they play.
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.
So maybe if people were actually piloting or tele-operating the mecha, but just watching semi-autonomous war machines destroy eachother? Meh
> 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!
(Linking that one as it's the first in which any of the teams completed the entire course)
Now build a robot that can catch a bullet.
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....