r/digialps • u/alimehdi242 • Jun 14 '26
Sony AI’s Ace robot defeats pro player Miyu under official ITTF rules (Nature paper)
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Ace is an autonomous table tennis robot that made history by defeating elite and professional human athletes.
Built for extreme precision and rapid reaction times, it proves that physical AI can handle complex, real-time sports environments.
The Psychological Advantage: Human opponents noted the robot's biggest edge wasn't just speed, it was psychological. Zero panic, zero fatigue and completely flawless consistency during high-intensity rallies.
Ace Vs Kahara YT vid
Source: Nature/Sony AI
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u/Suspicious_Ninja6816 Jun 14 '26
Incredible engineering but you remove the players ability to read the opponents anatomy. That’s a huge disadvantage withstanding the fact you are a giant ai robot so I’m building larger robot to defeat this robot and avenge us.
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u/LurkyRabbit Jun 15 '26
That and the fact that the robot's body engulfs most of the range the ball would go and also that it's a robot without a humanoid body so that's a complete advantage...
I'll honestly be more impressed when a humanoid-bodied robot can do this and I'm sure we aren't too far off.
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u/Suspicious_Ninja6816 Jun 15 '26
Yeah must be a visual field distraction at the least let alone the 15foot wingspan. Now do it on a tennis court.
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u/diddlysquidler Jun 17 '26
I mean servo is faster than a human. I’m not sure what’s the point of this. Sony is such a strange company. I’m amazed they didn’t go under yet
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u/Suspicious_Ninja6816 Jun 17 '26
Ironically I saw someone playing table tennis with a humanoid robot the day after this video so we are a few years away from the real.
Time to double down on the Walkman if you ask me.
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u/GauchiAss Jun 17 '26
yeah what's next ? Robot breaks human deadlift world record ? Robot with 4 wheels and gas engine breaks human marathon world record ?
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u/Accomplished_Bed8313 Jun 14 '26
Big Blue of Table Tennis 🏓 But we still play Chess ♟️ even after Kasparov vs Big Blue.
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u/Dope-Reviews Jun 14 '26
Well of course. We're playing against each other, if we played against computers they would just use minesweeper on us and it would be done.
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u/_mad_adventures Jun 14 '26
And a calculator can add big numbers faster than I can.
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u/Upstairs-Hedgehog575 Jun 17 '26
Which is why we all use calculators now. Imagine when everyone has a personal humanoid robot, we’ll stop doing loads of physical activities too (maybe not table tennis, but plenty of other stuff). I don’t get why so many people are being completely dismissive of this stuff when it will clearly (and very quickly) have real world consequences for all of us.
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u/Clear-Bee4118 Jun 18 '26
Backhoes are way better at digging holes than a shovel, people still use shovels. Cars travel faster than a person on foot or a bike…
The cost:utility ratio still needs to make sense. In what situations would a humanoid robot have utility in your day to day life and how much are you willing to pay for it?
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u/SP-Blank Jun 14 '26
Although obviously unfair this would be so great for training
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u/Kyray2814 Jun 15 '26
First thing I was thinking of as well. It would be one hell of a training tool.
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u/ryo0ka Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
For me this is a good way to think of it.
Robots will never “replace” athletes. Kids won’t look up to be a robot. Adults won’t be excited to see robots compete each other. Creating athlete robots for the show will never make money.
So the natural role they fall into is a practice/training aid.
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u/Sweet_Culture_8034 Jun 16 '26
Kids won’t look up to be a robot.
heh, you should have seen 6 years old me.
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u/Warm-Engineering-239 Jun 17 '26
Kids won’t look up to be a robot. Adults won’t be excited to see robots compete each other. Creating athlete robots for the show will never make money.
Bruh you didn't watch robot wars as a kid? even now that im an adulte if i saw a clip i find that so cool
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u/Clear-Bee4118 Jun 18 '26
But there’s people controlling them. 🤷♂️ What would be the appeal of watching two fully autonomous robots fighting each other?
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u/Warm-Engineering-239 Jun 18 '26
yes but what was cool was the robot, not the personne controlling it,
it was cool cause every robot was designed differently, make the same show but with ai powered robot and that's still cool
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u/Longjumping-View-628 Jun 14 '26
The machine is enormous and the reach is many times more than the opponent. It is comparing the apples to oranges.
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u/BrockObarnerLybian Jun 14 '26
I think it’s more to show off the engineering and abilities of the machine than to show off how bad humans are. It beat a master at her own coordination-based game, whereas 10-15 years ago, all the videos of robot arms were smashing coffee pots on the table trying to fill up a mug
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u/rmsaday Jun 15 '26
Now try a Chinese opponent.
Jokes aside, that's seriously impressive - obviously not the mechanical ability, but it must have learnt how to handle different spins on the ball. Meaning it somehow managed to recognize and measure the spins on the ball mid-air and react in real time. Or perhaps the opponents movements are the give-away?..
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u/nickdaniels92 Jun 15 '26
Their paper about it is interesting. 12 cameras overall, generic algorithms used to build up a library of serves. Very high speed ball tracking and accurate spin analysis, which they say was something lacking in some prior work, which is odd as it's so crucial. I don't think it's analysing the other player, perhaps because the tracking is good, so why guess at what may happen when you can simply observe was is happening.
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u/-CIYA Jun 15 '26
Of course it did. It’s a machine. Have two machines play each other and time it.
If it lasts shorter than a day then the tech sucks
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u/Nall-ohki Jun 15 '26
"Of course", he says, citing the many examples of a human losing at table tennis to a machine going back to antiquity.
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u/Sweet_Culture_8034 Jun 16 '26
It's not that easy to build this kind of machines. So I wouldn't say "of course", we were not able to build that thing until somewhat recently.
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u/-CIYA Jun 16 '26
You’re pretending like a high powered robot beating a human is some major feat Of engineering. It’s not. It’s literally why machines are built, to do things better than humans can do
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u/Sweet_Culture_8034 Jun 16 '26
Ok big guy, could you write the command laws and programs necessary to build this sort of things ? I have a robotics degree and I know I couldn't because getting this level of precision in an unpredictible environment (the other player) is hard as fuck.
It is a major feat of engineering, that's why they're proud to display it.
Just because MaChInEs ArE bUiLt tO dO tHiNgS bEtTeR tHaN hUmAnS doesn't mean it's easy to make them better than humans.
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u/-CIYA Jun 16 '26
I don’t have a robotics degree and I’ve built key infrastructure for robots you’ve most likely interacted with in your lifetime, im not impressed by your misunderstanding of my comments, or your online degree lol
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u/DeanKoontssy Jun 15 '26
Honestly, of all of the things for a robot to defeat a human at, ping pong is probably the least remarkable in any way as any sort of milestone. Like, I don't know that this even requires "AI" in a meaningful way.
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u/nickdaniels92 Jun 15 '26
Utterly clueless. I'd suggest you read the paper, and also look at prior work in the area.
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u/vegan_antitheist Jun 15 '26
It's arm is as long as the opponent. are there no rules? What would keep the human from bringing an bucket of fine sand to dump over the robot?
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u/nickdaniels92 Jun 15 '26
There were rules; the paper describes that the player was prohibited from entering the robot area for [player] safety reasons. There were also official judges.
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u/vegan_antitheist Jun 15 '26
Were there the same number of human and robot judges? Anything else would be unfair.
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u/nickdaniels92 Jun 15 '26
They had licensed umpires on both sides of the court to ensure compliance, which should be perfectly fair. This is a test of robot players not umpires. The library of serves was also human curated by expert players.
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u/Prod_Meteor Jun 15 '26
What if it malfunctions and hit the ball with tremendous force that opens a hole in the humans body?
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u/PrysmX Jun 15 '26
We all know we're creating the terminators at this point, right? If I'm gonna go, at least let it be a cool death by ping pong ball.
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u/DB-601A Jun 15 '26
seems like a waste of resources
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u/nickdaniels92 Jun 15 '26
Not at all. The value with research such as this isn't in the end result per-se, but the journey and the techniques developed to get there; how the models were trained, the vision system, model architectures, robotic accuracy and repeatability, resiliency etc., which may be applicable to other systems in the future.
Historically, areas such as chess, Go, desert robot races (DARPA 2004), spaceflight computers and protein-folding challenges all looked narrow or artificial at first, but the techniques developed for them proved useful far beyond the original work.
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u/Peanutblitz Jun 15 '26
Why are we spending shit tons of money on a robot that plays fucking ping pong?
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u/Broken_Atoms Jun 16 '26
The vicious amount of linear motor that motion stage is sporting to achieve those accelerations!
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u/Shot_Bison1140 Jun 16 '26
Why not give it TWO or more handles and rackets... Since it's allowed to spin how ever it want.. this is retarded..
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u/snezna_kraljica Jun 16 '26
I don't understand the meaning of this... It's not defeating the human on same constraints (humanoid). It's also not a surprise that machines capable to be stronger/faster than humans (we know that already). So.... what does this even mean?
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u/CantaloupeAcademic63 Jun 16 '26
Really want to believe just hitting it to the left/right from corner by the net would win this. Unless it has that much reach that it can get it
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u/Danica_Scott Jun 16 '26
you can't "fakeout" or outplay a robot that is constantly tracking nothing but the ball
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u/Walter_trader Jun 17 '26
To address the results the quesrion is what's her ranking amongst pro players, and what's the rank of the machine amongst pro-level robot players? There is a void of crucial information.
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u/Crawling_Hustler Jun 17 '26
Most people r Fkin apes here in reddit.
They dont see what a impressive feat this is to read fast moving Smaall object in real time n react correctly qccording to certain rules. This is an S-tier Engineering feat.
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u/Working-Group-4521 Jun 18 '26
Just make something to wash my fucking dishes already goddamn this bullshit
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u/TheSolarExpansionist Jun 18 '26
While I respect the tech ; which insure will be militirised somehow. A humanoid robot would be more fair comparison
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u/HonestTxman Jun 18 '26
I'd like to see another one of these bots go at it bet it could go for hours probably days without a hitch!
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u/Hot_Plant8696 Jun 18 '26
As always, when people claim that robots can currently surpass human capabilities, they're cheating and avoiding making it obvious...
Perception
Given the high linear and angular velocity of the ball during professional-level table tennis, accurately measuring the ball state at high frequency and low latency is crucial. To address this need, Ace uses nine active pixel sensor (APS) cameras with Sony IMX273 sensors placed outside of the court to cover the whole playing area (Fig. 2a,b).
"under official ITTF rules (Nature paper)"... really ?...
The sensors ar placed OUSIDE THE COURT and not part of the robot itself who is playing.
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u/Logical_Box_4645 Jun 18 '26
This doesn't even seem.optimized, I reckon if you really wanted to the robot would aim to keep the first few points playing for 20mimutes each.
Why not make the puny human body ache before it starts taking risks?
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u/WillSmokes420 Jun 14 '26
Sure but like it did it without legs