Is baseball next? Ping-pong robot beats elite

A few days in the past got here the astonishing news that the world document in the half-marathon was obliterated by a 5-foot-5 humanoid robot named Lightning in Beijing.

Now a robot named Ace has achieved another milestone for AI and robotics by defeating expert-level people at desk tennis in Tokyo, according to a research revealed Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.

What’s next, a robotic baseball participant named Babe that swats 500-foot home runs and throws 120 mph pitches, eclipsing Shohei Ohtani’s real-life achievements and commanding a billion greenback contract?

It’s all enjoyable and video games until it isn’t.

Extraordinary athletic achievements by AI robots may appear innocuous, particularly in contrast to far more grave threats described by varied consultants, including the landmark publication “An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks” by the Center for AI Safety in 2023.

To identify a few: Misinformation and social media manipulation; job displacement and financial inequality; cybersecurity threats; deadly autonomous weapons; environmental impression; psychological dependence; and finally, the existential risk to humanity of shedding control of rogue AI systems.

For now, let’s get back to ping-pong.

Ace was developed by good, previous Sony, the 80-year-old makers of gaming consoles, televisions, smartphones, cameras and audio tools that we get pleasure from every day.

Of course Sony has an AI research division, and while most customers had been still going ga-ga over PlayStation 5 Pro 2TB, it developed the first robot to attain expert-level efficiency in a aggressive bodily sport that requires fast selections and precision execution.

Ace integrates 9 synchronized cameras and three imaginative and prescient systems to monitor the spinning plastic ping-pong ball. Its lightning-fast processing time could be the envy of even Lightning, the humanoid robot that broke the world document in the half-marathon by almost seven minutes.

“Here we present Ace, to our knowledge the first real-world autonomous system competitive with elite human table tennis players,” the research said. “Ace addresses the challenges of physical real-time interaction through a new, high-speed perception system using event-based vision sensors and a new control system based on model-free reinforcement learning, as well as state-of-the-art high-speed robot hardware.”

Ace confirmed out in matches that adopted International Table Tennis Federation guidelines and had been officiated by licensed umpires. Most of the matches happened in 2025 — before desk tennis story “Marty Supreme” even hit theaters — although Ace defeated skilled gamers as just lately as March.

One such human is Mayuka Taira, who said in feedback supplied by Sony AI to GWN that the robot’s strengths are what one would possibly anticipate: unpredictability and an absence of emotion.

“Because you can’t read its reactions, it’s impossible to sense what kind of shots it dislikes or struggles with, and that makes it even more difficult to play against,” Taira said.

Initial real-world purposes of Ace-like robots probably could be in manufacturing and service industries, although untapped potential lies across sports activities, leisure and safety-critical environments, according to the research.

“These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction,” the research said.

Those domains actually may embrace baseball diamonds, basketball courts and gridirons. Hockey rinks might be lumped in supplied robots can skate.

AI already is used in MLB. The vaunted Automated Ball-Strike system (ABS) makes use of AI-powered Hawk-Eye digicam technology and laptop imaginative and prescient to decide if pitches are strikes or balls. Twelve high-speed cameras monitor ball flight and AI delivers the definitive call to the scoreboard within seconds of a problem.

A robotic batter going through a robotic pitcher with calls made by ABS would possibly remove any disagreements over balls and strikes.

Terrifying.

GWN contributed to this story.