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.
If you use node, you can do that... until someone decides to add eslint to the pipeline and you get thousands of formatting "errors" that you have to "fix".
In theory, they do. In practice, I have only seen one codebase — ONE — in all my years of programming that was using tabs and yet did not end up with spaces getting mixed in with those tabs at some point along the way. (In the indentation, I mean: obviously once the non-indentation part of the line starts, you want spaces there). And that codebase had precisely two people committing regularly to it. Occasional PRs from other contributors, but only two primary maintainers.
Every other tab-using codebase I've seen (of non-trivial size and complexity, that is), someone, somewhere, had been lazy, or had a misconfigured editor, or something, and spaces snuck into the tabs. The worst offender I ever saw was a file that had been edited by multiple people over the years, who must have had different tab settings in their editors. There was one section where they had tried to line up a bunch of variable assignments and values. (Yes, I know, bad idea, but stick with me for a minute, I'm getting to the punchline). None of the pieces of code that were supposed to line up were actually lined up. (This was C# code, so indentation didn't truly matter like it would in F#, or Python, or ... well, I won't list all of them since I'm trying to get to the point). Here's the really hilarious part. I tried all sorts of tab settings to see if I could get that file to line up. I tried 8. I tried 4. I tried 2. I even tried 3, the setting for the people who can't make their minds up between 4 and 2. Then I tried really oddball settings like 16, 5, or even 7. Nothing worked. There was no tab-size setting I could use that would make the code line up.
That was the day I said "Forget about tabs, just use spaces, you won't have that problem with spaces." Tabs have great promise, but in practice, in my experience at least, you end up having to tell your colleagues "hey, you need to set your tabs to 4" (or 8) "before editing this file". Which almost negates the promise of tabs. They're great in theory, but I've only seen ONE codebase that made them work in practice.
So long as my format is the standard one, that all newcomers an unopinionateds see by default and thus my opinions rule forever... yeah! great idea! otherwise... oh hayol no.
Maybe if it is a slow exchange. But I suspect, that trying that when the exchange is fast, will make one react way too slow. The inference happens by looking of how the opponent moved their racket/paddle. That starts way earlier, than one could possibly see it looking at the ball and tracking the logo.
I do not understand why people who get serious about it want so badly for it to be called table tennis. Ping pong is a way more fun name, and table tennis just seems to make it out to be a smaller, inferior version of tennis.
In the context of competitive events, it probably makes sense to use "table tennis," simply because there is one notable event that uses "ping pong" to refer specifically to different set of rules and equipment (the World Championship of Ping Pong).
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
But chess is a turn-based game where there's no deception (in the sense that both players can see all legal moves for both themselves and their opposition at all times), whereas in table tennis, it's in real time, it's fast as hell, the table is small, and the ball can have 2 or 3 different spin types from the same arm/hand/wrist movement , and can land in a number of different spots.
Interesting point. There are a lot of sports (football, basketball) where the cumulative rules end up requiring any player to have a humanoid form (references to elbows and knees and hands and feet, etc.), but even in ping pong it kind of seems like cheating to have a non-humanoid form factor.
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.
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.
Humans use every clue they can get to predict the trajectory as early as possible.
For example most players use a roughly similar technique for a certain stroke, e.g. the forehand topspin. They also tend to have a pretty narrow angle that they usually play it, relative to their body and their movement. Players use that predict where the ball will move, and position themselves accordingly. And they start that movement before their opponent has touched the ball.
Some players can deceive others by bending their wrist right before ball contact, which sends the ball in an unexpected direction (but that usually comes at the cost of an increased risk of missing the shot).
Similarly, the size of the stroke limits the pace (and spin) you can apply to the ball; when the opponent starts a short stroke, you can be sure the shot won't be fastest, and move closer to the table.
What the ball does is only determined by the contact with the bat. But it is true that you can often correctly predict what the bat will do based on the movement of the player's body.
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.
I'm already impressed by their progress, but I wouldn't say it puts robots on par with humans when it comes to table tennis.
Another limitation is that most humans[0] cannot actually see the spin that's on a ball, but need to predict it based on relative racquet movement to the ball. In the video, they say that their system measures spin.
[0]: Table tennis legend Timo Boll has stated that he has excellent eyesight, and can actually see the rotation of the ball, which helped him during service receive.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, building an AI that analyses camera imagery and aims at humans, from scratch, is these days almost an intern project. It's not really something you can control or ban, the way you can control, dunno, uranium enrichment.
Integrating it with a robot and sticking a gun on it, thankfully, requires a bit more know-how.
3) they can see if any countermeasures would be effective
4) they can figure out what to look for and find those weapons before they're fired
cfr. nuclear deterrence, right. There is "nothing" the US can do about other nations enriching uranium and making bombs, other than bombing those countries. The US can't change the laws of physics, follow the right formula and it'll work. However the US can figure out exactly what to look for to either prevent it from happening through intervention or at the very least get some warning before it's used ...
And then it will be just another war crime committed daily conflicts, and nothing will happen because there is no world police ?
Ask Ukrainians, Lebanese, Gazaoui, Somalilanders, or even Iranians for that matters - that may not make a big difference to today...
What I would love to see is a local government suing an arms producer for the efficacy of their weapons. (Or even funnier, the owner of a home destroyed by a drone, suiving the GPS company.)
We all know that the only things people in suits are really afraid of, more than hell, is a bad Q4 report and an expensive lawsuit.
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!
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?
> They are extremely vulnerable to the same drones humans are.
I am not confident about this. Human gets disabled by few small shrapnel projectiles into soft tissue. It is possible to build way more protected robot, for which you need some direct hit to disable it. That robot could also be very agile: e.g. do some evading jump at the last moment before being hit.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I disagree. If your charitable application is profitable, it will get funded.
Now, people will hate you for doing a "good" thing for money (exhibit A : name any pharma company selling the drugs that keep people alive ; that company is going to get called a "cynical shill" given enough profit.)
It just happens that the bad things are often highly profitable, so the investors will pour the pensioners money in (because the pension money must flow.)
That being said, the best way to get funded is not for your app to be good or bad, but to be massively fun. Sell tulips, video games and Céline Dion tickets. Find a way to divert 10% of the benefits to a charity.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Given how the "peaceful" way failed in the last few decades, it's not insane to assume they might try a good old fashion invasion at some point.
From what I understand (as in "from what William Spaniel says"), given the weather constraints, it's something to look at closely every April and October. Seems like we're good for this April (which was not a given - attacking while the US is wasting ammunition in the Middle-East must surely have been tempting..)
What do you want me to take from your BBC article? Their mutual and explicit commitments to peace?
> it's something to look at closely every April and October. Seems like we're good for this April
So the rationale for the belief is that a specific American scholar says it. And what he says is "it could happen any time but so far we've always been lucky."
Honestly without any actual reasoning or evidence to back that up it's difficult to take it any more seriously than a tarot reading.
> 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.
That being said, "the Russian army will be driven to a virtual stalemate by a former comedian leading a decentralized group of startups remote-controlling handmade Wall-E clones equiped with machine guns, while the former real tv anchor leading the US army helps the Russian side to distract people from the pedophile ring he did _not_ take part in" would have sound very tongue on cheek, too.
> 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.
I expect China to invade Taiwan, because they now know they likely can. I do not expect them to "run out of soldiers".
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.
> 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.
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.
One outcome is to just sacrifice your human population as meat shield or bait. Only thing you need to maintain your control on your corner of the world is the robots, not meatbag humans with all the liability inherent to that.
This. I'm pretty sure any sufficiently autonomous / AI driven / remote control battalion will embed some "volontary" humans, so that "nuking the robots from orbit" is at least politically unpopular.
Though, given what we've used bombs and drones to do to unarmed civilians in the last century, that might done make military planner budge...
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.
It becomes nearly impossible for citizens to overthrow dictatorships, and countries with weak democracies will quickly be overpowered by the oligarchs living there, who can now impose their will on the larger population of poor citizens with impunity without worrying about being overthrown by overwhelming numbers. Having an electorate that is so misinformed that it can elect Trump becomes a much more dangerous liability.
Makes me think with the whole zuck ai at these ideas are ultimately immortal. Which is terrifying. Kill zuck the man, but with this you don’t kill zuck the idea which is what you wanted to kill in the first place. That zuck ai will be around 1000 years from now in control of vast planetary resources. The real zuck long since discarded with the rest of the human population.
People were making jokes about the recent chinese robot marathon saying this is how it will be when they get drafted to defend taiwan from chinese invasion. Just running from these robots that can full sprint as fast as a tiger with no lactic acid build up. They were hot swapping batteries during the race so these things really have no down time.
Is it possible South Koreans edge in RTS games is from their compulsory military service?
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
People said that about iran if they closed the strait, and here we are week number what now with them being seemingly little worse for the wear. Maybe these predictions are too pessimistic.
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
> we're all expecting China needs to invade Taiwan soon
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.
> Ah yes, China has a track record of invading countries.
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…
China has been “advanced” for a handful of years now. It’s going to get a lot worse because conscience is a throwaway concept for them when it comes to achieving outcomes.
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.
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%.
Yes, in a perfect world we'd have infinite nurses who have infinite time to spend quality time with each client.
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.
>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.
Yeah shit, I don't know which is worse.
My plan is just dying before I reach that stage.
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.
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...
The Taiwanese while being proud Taiwanese (rather than Chinese) are culturally Chinese. After all they came from the mainland after having lost the civil war.
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.."
The majority of Taiwanese are the descendants of the people who lived there before 1949, not the descendants of the Chinese Nationalists who fled there at the end of the civil war. In fact, the Taiwanese were, uniquely among East Asian nationalities, relatively happy being part of the Japanese Empire and have maintained good relations with Japan ever since.
You're correct. But in practice the native people have been assimilated and the predominant culture is that of "Chinese'
Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese during the WW2 and just like everywhere else the Japanese were hated for their criminal actions. Taiwan was no exception. Today there also disputes for example the Senkaku islands.
It's a bit more complicated than I implied because many or most Taiwanese prior to the beginning of KMT rule were still ethnically Chinese; they just hadn't been part of "China" for 50 years (a period when there wasn't a stable, unified "China" anyway). "Occupation" is a controversial term for the period of Japanese rule and the Japanese weren't "hated" in Taiwan to the same degree they were in other occupied territories. The period of Japanese rule from 1895-1945 was a colonial government, but it was probably better than what was going on on the mainland at the time--domination by Western powers, the warlord era, the civil war, and a much more brutal Japanese occupation. The difference between Japan's treatment of Taiwan and mainland China is a big part of the difference in perspective towards the Japanese between the mainlanders and the Taiwanese.
Some of the main proponents of the "Japanese occupation" narrative are the KMT, who committed plenty of atrocities of their own after taking over Taiwan and, among many Taiwanese, ended up more hated than the Japanese. The KMT was also serious about their lost cause of retaking the mainland, at which point they expected Taiwan and China to remain unified under their rule, with the famous "One China Principle" representing not just the CCP's desire to control Taiwan, but the principle shared by the KMT that Taiwan is part of China and should be under the same government. In recent years, the KMT has pivoted towards cooperation with the CCP with an aim towards peaceful reunification, while the DPP favors explicit Taiwanese independence (Taiwan's official constitutional stance still being that it is the legitimate Republic of China).
To be fair to the KMT, they also ushered in Taiwanese democracy. When Chiang Kai-shek died, his son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo ended martial law, promised to be the last Chiang to rule Taiwan, and began the transition to democracy. His successor, Lee Teng-hui, was Taiwanese-born and finished the transition to democracy, winning the first democratic Taiwanese presidential election in 1996 before stepping down at the end of his term limit in 2000, at which point power transitioned to the DPP. Lee was also controversial with the hardliners in his own party for, among other things, his more sympathetic attitude towards Japan.
I suppose the Tibetan people would have a different opinion. But it's true that China has not fought as many war as the US, UK or France in the past decades.
Which is actually part of the enigma : if China decided to use a window of opportunity to invade a neighbor (and they have claims on Taiwan, they keep telling the world they have claims on Taiwan, and they keep preparing their navy to invade Taiwan, so it's not entirely unreasonable to expect that country would be Taiwan), would they have an inexperienced army making rookie mistakes and miscalculations, or would they catch everyone of guard with a a crazily autonomous army of robots that don't care about the weather or war crimes ?
I would not ask the same question about any other country in the world, but, if Russia and the US surprised us by failing at what they were supposed to be great at, and Ukraine surprised us by being good at one no one expected, I expect a surprise from china, but I don't know which one !!!
Tibet is part of China for hundreds of years (1720–1912) with short period exemption (1912–1951), people who think China just suddenly invaded Tibet in 1951 out of blue are delusional or should learn history
btw. just because you hear loud minority (?) of Tibetan people unhappy with China's rule doesn't mean there is not big part of them who have no problem with benefitting from being part of China rather than let's say India/Nepal
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.
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:
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.
> 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?
Anyone else entirely unimpressed? I'm just thinking about all the sensor and responsive things that must exist for cars, planes, manufacturing etc, and this just seems like an inevitable trick that someone could do?
Like, my kid watches the Mark Rober videos and this is just that?
Not to take anything away from the robot, but I would have liked to see the match be against a male player, as they can impart higher speed an spin on the ball, which would give the robot less reaction time.
It did play against a male player, as outlined in the article:
> 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.
It did also win against two male players - you can see some of the replays and the scores in the actual sony publicity video here: https://ace.ai.sony/.
Most notably the best player it played (#64 last year) it lost against quite handily, 11-2, 11-6.
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.
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?
I watched this video two times(I love it) . the thing is , he is using to solve is hybrid approach , not fully neural based (which make sense, for the compute limitation , and obviously it is still amazing ) . but there could be many approaches for this , like fully neural based or work with less hardware..etc ..etc ( there is many I just cant recall it right now) . I am waiting for someone making that version of this
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I absolutely think people will watch humanoid robots fight to the “death”. I also think they will watch them do incredible parkour, run the 100m in 5 secs, do 1000 mile marathons, etc. with the important caveat being that they are humanoid shaped.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43861207
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?
Only if you accept that they are set to 8.
go fmt
I refuse. My code will be formatted according to my own preferences.
No one's stopping you from that, as long as your preferences coincide with go fmt ;-)
If you use node, you can do that... until someone decides to add eslint to the pipeline and you get thousands of formatting "errors" that you have to "fix".
Imagine a world where your editor shows you what you want to see… but saves in a standard format for sharing.
That's what tabs accomplish!
In theory, they do. In practice, I have only seen one codebase — ONE — in all my years of programming that was using tabs and yet did not end up with spaces getting mixed in with those tabs at some point along the way. (In the indentation, I mean: obviously once the non-indentation part of the line starts, you want spaces there). And that codebase had precisely two people committing regularly to it. Occasional PRs from other contributors, but only two primary maintainers.
Every other tab-using codebase I've seen (of non-trivial size and complexity, that is), someone, somewhere, had been lazy, or had a misconfigured editor, or something, and spaces snuck into the tabs. The worst offender I ever saw was a file that had been edited by multiple people over the years, who must have had different tab settings in their editors. There was one section where they had tried to line up a bunch of variable assignments and values. (Yes, I know, bad idea, but stick with me for a minute, I'm getting to the punchline). None of the pieces of code that were supposed to line up were actually lined up. (This was C# code, so indentation didn't truly matter like it would in F#, or Python, or ... well, I won't list all of them since I'm trying to get to the point). Here's the really hilarious part. I tried all sorts of tab settings to see if I could get that file to line up. I tried 8. I tried 4. I tried 2. I even tried 3, the setting for the people who can't make their minds up between 4 and 2. Then I tried really oddball settings like 16, 5, or even 7. Nothing worked. There was no tab-size setting I could use that would make the code line up.
That was the day I said "Forget about tabs, just use spaces, you won't have that problem with spaces." Tabs have great promise, but in practice, in my experience at least, you end up having to tell your colleagues "hey, you need to set your tabs to 4" (or 8) "before editing this file". Which almost negates the promise of tabs. They're great in theory, but I've only seen ONE codebase that made them work in practice.
So long as my format is the standard one, that all newcomers an unopinionateds see by default and thus my opinions rule forever... yeah! great idea! otherwise... oh hayol no.
Luckily Go is only used by people looking for a typed version of Python.
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)
In french, we call that ping pong too. So yeah for ping pong.
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.
Then we should at least write it correctly: Pīngpāng
[1]: https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&email=...
>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.
Maybe if it is a slow exchange. But I suspect, that trying that when the exchange is fast, will make one react way too slow. The inference happens by looking of how the opponent moved their racket/paddle. That starts way earlier, than one could possibly see it looking at the ball and tracking the logo.
Lmao the character used is so cute
I do not understand why people who get serious about it want so badly for it to be called table tennis. Ping pong is a way more fun name, and table tennis just seems to make it out to be a smaller, inferior version of tennis.
In the context of competitive events, it probably makes sense to use "table tennis," simply because there is one notable event that uses "ping pong" to refer specifically to different set of rules and equipment (the World Championship of Ping Pong).
According to this video it can read the spin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
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?
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!
Apologies! I left a much clearer edit on screen, and when I noticed I had not commited it, the edit window had closed.
It was actually called ping pong until it became a trademark dispute, and the sport had to call it table tennis!
> Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
Is it also MOVING STAIRCASE, NOT ESCALATOR?
乒乓. I don't know how it could be more clear that it's not "table tennis".
> Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
We can also add Whiff Waff to the alternative names!
It’s miniature table pickleball.
It's ping pong.
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
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
Ping Pong is what you play for fun in the basement. The competitive sport is Table Tennis.
This is like software developers who write javascript wanting to be called engineers, isn't it
Erm, excuse me?
The professional engineering language is called TypeScript.
JavaScript is what you use to add popups to your GeoCities WebSite.
> professional engineering language
> TypeScript
rofl
lol all you want. I’ve got 5 people on my team buying food and housing for their families with typescript skills.
It's great that they start somewhere in computers, kuddos to them.
It's great that they're earning a living, but "engineering" is a very puffed-up title for that activity.
They're not even controlling a train or wearing a stripey hat. Losers.
You are right, I am wearing 2 stripey hats!
Vibe code
It's Wiff Waff actually [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uix9kXIMVRM
The ball trajectory gives the spin
It's pīngpāng.
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[dead]
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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
When you feel how depressinglyslowly 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.
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/
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.
Yes, you're dead on:
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.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
Oh, they can. They just need a human touch to actually improve.
For now. It's a work in progress.
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.
But chess is a turn-based game where there's no deception (in the sense that both players can see all legal moves for both themselves and their opposition at all times), whereas in table tennis, it's in real time, it's fast as hell, the table is small, and the ball can have 2 or 3 different spin types from the same arm/hand/wrist movement , and can land in a number of different spots.
Interesting point. There are a lot of sports (football, basketball) where the cumulative rules end up requiring any player to have a humanoid form (references to elbows and knees and hands and feet, etc.), but even in ping pong it kind of seems like cheating to have a non-humanoid form factor.
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.
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.
That's not how humans operate though.
Humans use every clue they can get to predict the trajectory as early as possible. For example most players use a roughly similar technique for a certain stroke, e.g. the forehand topspin. They also tend to have a pretty narrow angle that they usually play it, relative to their body and their movement. Players use that predict where the ball will move, and position themselves accordingly. And they start that movement before their opponent has touched the ball.
Some players can deceive others by bending their wrist right before ball contact, which sends the ball in an unexpected direction (but that usually comes at the cost of an increased risk of missing the shot).
Similarly, the size of the stroke limits the pace (and spin) you can apply to the ball; when the opponent starts a short stroke, you can be sure the shot won't be fastest, and move closer to the table.
What the ball does is only determined by the contact with the bat. But it is true that you can often correctly predict what the bat will do based on the movement of the player's body.
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.
I'll be impressed when it's a humanoid robot that has to contend with similar kinematic limitations as a human player.
I'm already impressed by their progress, but I wouldn't say it puts robots on par with humans when it comes to table tennis.
Another limitation is that most humans[0] cannot actually see the spin that's on a ball, but need to predict it based on relative racquet movement to the ball. In the video, they say that their system measures spin.
[0]: Table tennis legend Timo Boll has stated that he has excellent eyesight, and can actually see the rotation of the ball, which helped him during service receive.
Yeah, the dang thing can reach all the way to the net while standing three feet behind the table
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.
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
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 ?
> 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.
People saw Black Mirror and made a business plan out of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror)
Also this shortfilm SlaughterBots from 2019 https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU?is=F7RNLXcVuLA5A_lA
It’s been a part of sci-fi for a long time.
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.
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.
Sadly, building an AI that analyses camera imagery and aims at humans, from scratch, is these days almost an intern project. It's not really something you can control or ban, the way you can control, dunno, uranium enrichment.
Integrating it with a robot and sticking a gun on it, thankfully, requires a bit more know-how.
> 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?
1) they'll know it exists in the first place
2) they can figure out a plan for when it happens
3) they can see if any countermeasures would be effective
4) they can figure out what to look for and find those weapons before they're fired
cfr. nuclear deterrence, right. There is "nothing" the US can do about other nations enriching uranium and making bombs, other than bombing those countries. The US can't change the laws of physics, follow the right formula and it'll work. However the US can figure out exactly what to look for to either prevent it from happening through intervention or at the very least get some warning before it's used ...
Don you know?
The world peace and harmony will be achieved when all the good guys will gather together and kill all the bad guys.
I can't wait for the day that killing a human-any human-is considered a war crime.
I can't wait for the adds for war crime defense attorneys.
And then it will be just another war crime committed daily conflicts, and nothing will happen because there is no world police ?
Ask Ukrainians, Lebanese, Gazaoui, Somalilanders, or even Iranians for that matters - that may not make a big difference to today...
What I would love to see is a local government suing an arms producer for the efficacy of their weapons. (Or even funnier, the owner of a home destroyed by a drone, suiving the GPS company.)
We all know that the only things people in suits are really afraid of, more than hell, is a bad Q4 report and an expensive lawsuit.
Friendly fire is going to get crazy. Can’t trust an LLM on its own for more than a few iterations..
Don’t worry, it will auto compact its context.
I can't wait for the Faro Plague and the robot dinosaurs.
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!
> 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?
Well in this case it was made by and for Japanese speakers.
I guess Russians are scary for everyone. Including Russians, I assume.
All of my Russian friends briefly become terrified when they pass by a mirror, and have to regain their composure.
Not marching, but Ukraine uses continuous track machine gun robots seemingly very effectively. They aren’t suicide ones.
https://archive.is/dpNsN
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.
> They are extremely vulnerable to the same drones humans are.
I am not confident about this. Human gets disabled by few small shrapnel projectiles into soft tissue. It is possible to build way more protected robot, for which you need some direct hit to disable it. That robot could also be very agile: e.g. do some evading jump at the last moment before being hit.
I think you just pitched a Robot Wars revival for 2026.
This article shows them being used for offense.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/20/europe/robots-ukraine-bat...
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.
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.
They don’t need to be remotely controlled anymore! Autonomous!
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> 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.
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.
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.
I disagree. If your charitable application is profitable, it will get funded.
Now, people will hate you for doing a "good" thing for money (exhibit A : name any pharma company selling the drugs that keep people alive ; that company is going to get called a "cynical shill" given enough profit.)
It just happens that the bad things are often highly profitable, so the investors will pour the pensioners money in (because the pension money must flow.)
That being said, the best way to get funded is not for your app to be good or bad, but to be massively fun. Sell tulips, video games and Céline Dion tickets. Find a way to divert 10% of the benefits to a charity.
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.
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> 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.
> 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.
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.
Which of those is opening doors?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The Marines did it with a rocket launcher. https://www.twz.com/marines-test-fire-robot-dog-armed-with-r...
I'll carry an ammo belt of little EMP devices.
A microwave weapon could be effective. And reusable.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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
But also more deaths. It's the delta that's important.
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.
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 ?
> 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?
It's not "western projection" to say that China _wants_ to get Taiwan at some point.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj94y87k2ljo
Given how the "peaceful" way failed in the last few decades, it's not insane to assume they might try a good old fashion invasion at some point.
From what I understand (as in "from what William Spaniel says"), given the weather constraints, it's something to look at closely every April and October. Seems like we're good for this April (which was not a given - attacking while the US is wasting ammunition in the Middle-East must surely have been tempting..)
What do you want me to take from your BBC article? Their mutual and explicit commitments to peace?
> it's something to look at closely every April and October. Seems like we're good for this April
So the rationale for the belief is that a specific American scholar says it. And what he says is "it could happen any time but so far we've always been lucky."
Honestly without any actual reasoning or evidence to back that up it's difficult to take it any more seriously than a tarot reading.
The invasion of Greenland seems much more likely.
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.
This was tongue in cheek, yes.
That being said, "the Russian army will be driven to a virtual stalemate by a former comedian leading a decentralized group of startups remote-controlling handmade Wall-E clones equiped with machine guns, while the former real tv anchor leading the US army helps the Russian side to distract people from the pedophile ring he did _not_ take part in" would have sound very tongue on cheek, too.
haha agreed
> 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.
I expect China to invade Taiwan, because they now know they likely can. I do not expect them to "run out of soldiers".
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.
> 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.
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.
All war tends toward total war, so that will never happen no. The incentive to break any such agreements is too strong.
One outcome is to just sacrifice your human population as meat shield or bait. Only thing you need to maintain your control on your corner of the world is the robots, not meatbag humans with all the liability inherent to that.
This. I'm pretty sure any sufficiently autonomous / AI driven / remote control battalion will embed some "volontary" humans, so that "nuking the robots from orbit" is at least politically unpopular.
Though, given what we've used bombs and drones to do to unarmed civilians in the last century, that might done make military planner budge...
Philip K Dick wrote a short story similar to this, "The Defenders".
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.
It becomes nearly impossible for citizens to overthrow dictatorships, and countries with weak democracies will quickly be overpowered by the oligarchs living there, who can now impose their will on the larger population of poor citizens with impunity without worrying about being overthrown by overwhelming numbers. Having an electorate that is so misinformed that it can elect Trump becomes a much more dangerous liability.
Makes me think with the whole zuck ai at these ideas are ultimately immortal. Which is terrifying. Kill zuck the man, but with this you don’t kill zuck the idea which is what you wanted to kill in the first place. That zuck ai will be around 1000 years from now in control of vast planetary resources. The real zuck long since discarded with the rest of the human population.
People were making jokes about the recent chinese robot marathon saying this is how it will be when they get drafted to defend taiwan from chinese invasion. Just running from these robots that can full sprint as fast as a tiger with no lactic acid build up. They were hot swapping batteries during the race so these things really have no down time.
Is it possible South Koreans edge in RTS games is from their compulsory military service?
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
> Is it possible South Koreans edge in RTS games is from their compulsory military service?
Unlikely, most players postpone their service as long as possible, and majority does not play professionally again after completing it.
People said that about iran if they closed the strait, and here we are week number what now with them being seemingly little worse for the wear. Maybe these predictions are too pessimistic.
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...
> we're all expecting China needs to invade Taiwan soon
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.
> Ah yes, China has a track record of invading countries.
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…
Sounds benign compared the kind of shit the Americans do.
China has been “advanced” for a handful of years now. It’s going to get a lot worse because conscience is a throwaway concept for them when it comes to achieving outcomes.
Not good to make assumptions of people you don't really know about.
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.
The answer is and always has been "nukes" unfortunately.
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.
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%.
Yes, in a perfect world we'd have infinite nurses who have infinite time to spend quality time with each client.
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.
>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.
Yeah shit, I don't know which is worse. My plan is just dying before I reach that stage.
I’m hoping self-administered euthanasia is more common when I get there.
Too many ways to wither away slowly in my genes. I’d rather have All The Fun and then go on my own terms.
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.
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...
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.
The Taiwanese while being proud Taiwanese (rather than Chinese) are culturally Chinese. After all they came from the mainland after having lost the civil war.
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.."
The majority of Taiwanese are the descendants of the people who lived there before 1949, not the descendants of the Chinese Nationalists who fled there at the end of the civil war. In fact, the Taiwanese were, uniquely among East Asian nationalities, relatively happy being part of the Japanese Empire and have maintained good relations with Japan ever since.
You're correct. But in practice the native people have been assimilated and the predominant culture is that of "Chinese'
Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese during the WW2 and just like everywhere else the Japanese were hated for their criminal actions. Taiwan was no exception. Today there also disputes for example the Senkaku islands.
It's a bit more complicated than I implied because many or most Taiwanese prior to the beginning of KMT rule were still ethnically Chinese; they just hadn't been part of "China" for 50 years (a period when there wasn't a stable, unified "China" anyway). "Occupation" is a controversial term for the period of Japanese rule and the Japanese weren't "hated" in Taiwan to the same degree they were in other occupied territories. The period of Japanese rule from 1895-1945 was a colonial government, but it was probably better than what was going on on the mainland at the time--domination by Western powers, the warlord era, the civil war, and a much more brutal Japanese occupation. The difference between Japan's treatment of Taiwan and mainland China is a big part of the difference in perspective towards the Japanese between the mainlanders and the Taiwanese.
Some of the main proponents of the "Japanese occupation" narrative are the KMT, who committed plenty of atrocities of their own after taking over Taiwan and, among many Taiwanese, ended up more hated than the Japanese. The KMT was also serious about their lost cause of retaking the mainland, at which point they expected Taiwan and China to remain unified under their rule, with the famous "One China Principle" representing not just the CCP's desire to control Taiwan, but the principle shared by the KMT that Taiwan is part of China and should be under the same government. In recent years, the KMT has pivoted towards cooperation with the CCP with an aim towards peaceful reunification, while the DPP favors explicit Taiwanese independence (Taiwan's official constitutional stance still being that it is the legitimate Republic of China).
To be fair to the KMT, they also ushered in Taiwanese democracy. When Chiang Kai-shek died, his son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo ended martial law, promised to be the last Chiang to rule Taiwan, and began the transition to democracy. His successor, Lee Teng-hui, was Taiwanese-born and finished the transition to democracy, winning the first democratic Taiwanese presidential election in 1996 before stepping down at the end of his term limit in 2000, at which point power transitioned to the DPP. Lee was also controversial with the hardliners in his own party for, among other things, his more sympathetic attitude towards Japan.
I suppose the Tibetan people would have a different opinion. But it's true that China has not fought as many war as the US, UK or France in the past decades.
Which is actually part of the enigma : if China decided to use a window of opportunity to invade a neighbor (and they have claims on Taiwan, they keep telling the world they have claims on Taiwan, and they keep preparing their navy to invade Taiwan, so it's not entirely unreasonable to expect that country would be Taiwan), would they have an inexperienced army making rookie mistakes and miscalculations, or would they catch everyone of guard with a a crazily autonomous army of robots that don't care about the weather or war crimes ?
I would not ask the same question about any other country in the world, but, if Russia and the US surprised us by failing at what they were supposed to be great at, and Ukraine surprised us by being good at one no one expected, I expect a surprise from china, but I don't know which one !!!
Tibet is part of China for hundreds of years (1720–1912) with short period exemption (1912–1951), people who think China just suddenly invaded Tibet in 1951 out of blue are delusional or should learn history
btw. just because you hear loud minority (?) of Tibetan people unhappy with China's rule doesn't mean there is not big part of them who have no problem with benefitting from being part of China rather than let's say India/Nepal
Nature video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
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.
Makes sense that it would.
Reminds me of this old The Onion story: https://theonion.com/ping-pong-somehow-elicits-macho-posturi...
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:
https://youtu.be/lWp6XNHaWRk
> 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.
Yes, that too. Point being that AI is not supposed to think for us but to work for us.
> the primary purpose of AI is still, first and foremost, to relieve us of the physical labor we don't want to do.
That's for robots, not AI. There's a difference.
But the robot needs to have an AI brain to be able to do more than just very specialized work.
UBI is a phantom. If (when?) AI takes over and everyone is put on UBI, the problems we'll deem important will be finding enough food to survive.
Does UBI not mean that one does _not_ have to worry about finding enough food to survive?
If you follow that definition, it can (and will) stop existing. Don't count on Sam Altman to keep your groceries affordable.
I agree with you. The people developing AI don’t agree.
I am not sure. When the market demands robots, there will be people who develop robots.
Well, I guess we’re going to fire all the Ping-pong players at the office and replace them with these robots.
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.
> 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?
Would assume the top amateur players that don't play professionally.
Professionals play for money. Elites just do it.
So, an amateur player
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.
Anyone else entirely unimpressed? I'm just thinking about all the sensor and responsive things that must exist for cars, planes, manufacturing etc, and this just seems like an inevitable trick that someone could do?
Like, my kid watches the Mark Rober videos and this is just that?
I suppose this recent love-letter video to a random table top game from Rockstar games from NakeyJakey is now relevent to this thread...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cMc4M5QJvM
Not to take anything away from the robot, but I would have liked to see the match be against a male player, as they can impart higher speed an spin on the ball, which would give the robot less reaction time.
It did play against a male player, as outlined in the article:
> 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.
It did but didn’t win against not win against the male. It’s in the video from Sony AI.
It did also win against two male players - you can see some of the replays and the scores in the actual sony publicity video here: https://ace.ai.sony/.
Most notably the best player it played (#64 last year) it lost against quite handily, 11-2, 11-6.
In case anyone is interested, here is a paper on how they implement this.
https://arxiv.org/html/2504.10035v2
Sure? The website points to an article in Nature with different authors. They seem to refer to the people from Tübingen, though.
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.
> robots other than those cliche dog like ones....that does nothing but walk.
They may be testing camera's and microphones.
Is there a video of this in action? Pictures are not satisfying at all!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
https://sonyresearch.github.io/ace_public/
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.
Any links to actual full matches played? I only see a point here, a point there, no full matches.
I wonder if human TT players can learn to use multiple cameras or points of view.
What happens when two of them play each other?
How easy is it to introduce artifacts that reduce accuracy and performance?
Do you think they ever built two of them? :-)
> How easy is it to introduce artifacts that reduce accuracy and performance?
Probably pretty easy. Have less-than-perfect lighting or introduce some wind, and the AI has to do a huge amount of relearning.
Robo-augmented padel, the future
Obligatory Stuff Made Here robot putter: https://youtu.be/2OfjZ3ORJfc?si=IHdZaLJE2TBg45HF
I watched this video two times(I love it) . the thing is , he is using to solve is hybrid approach , not fully neural based (which make sense, for the compute limitation , and obviously it is still amazing ) . but there could be many approaches for this , like fully neural based or work with less hardware..etc ..etc ( there is many I just cant recall it right now) . I am waiting for someone making that version of 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.
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.
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.
Coming soon to an ICE Goon Squad near you!
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 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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
When I watched Battle Bots and Gundam Wing as a kid - even though the robots were cool without the human side of the story it’s all pretty lame.
So maybe if people were actually piloting or tele-operating the mecha, but just watching semi-autonomous war machines destroy eachother? Meh
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.
I absolutely think people will watch humanoid robots fight to the “death”. I also think they will watch them do incredible parkour, run the 100m in 5 secs, do 1000 mile marathons, etc. with the important caveat being that they are humanoid shaped.
maybe once or twice then the novelty will wear off like it always does
Battlebots has been going on for 25 years. F1 even longer. Monster trucks, nascar, FPV racing etc. They will keep us interested.
The greatest blernsball player was a machine for playing blernsball.
> 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!
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)
Here's an entrance to the rabbit hole: https://www.a1k0n.net/2021/01/22/indoor-localization.html
Absolutely love this idea, it sounds very fun
robot ping pong league
It would be a good benchmark for humanoid robots
Is that a legal serve?
Technically not, because you're required to toss the ball with your free hand.
However, exceptions are made, for example I once played against a one-handed player, he simply tossed it with his playing hand, it was fine.
It's a bit hard to tell if the toss was high enough, it's supposed to be 15cm (about the height of the net), and this seems to be close to the limit.
Finally an AI that takes someone's job and nobody's upset about it.
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.
SpaceX Mechzilla chopstick catch of Starship booster is up there for difficulty.
careful what you wish for.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.