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phtrivier 13 hours ago [-]
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 ?
cik 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
matwood 9 minutes ago [-]
People saw Black Mirror and made a business plan out of it.
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.
spwa4 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
squigz 18 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
danny_codes 2 hours ago [-]
Friendly fire is going to get crazy. Can’t trust an LLM on its own for more than a few iterations..
TheScaryOne 3 hours ago [-]
I can't wait for the Faro Plague and the robot dinosaurs.
kibwen 12 hours ago [-]
Marching humanoid terminator robots will never be as cheap as a drone. Autonomous suicide drone swarms are what should terrify you.
throw4847285 11 hours ago [-]
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!
antonvs 3 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
fhub 2 hours ago [-]
Not marching, but Ukraine uses continuous track machine gun robots seemingly very effectively. They aren’t suicide ones.
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.
trhway 12 hours ago [-]
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.
DennisP 8 hours ago [-]
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.
trhway 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Gud 6 hours ago [-]
They don’t need to be remotely controlled anymore! Autonomous!
k4rnaj1k 2 hours ago [-]
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fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
Which of those is opening doors?
4gotunameagain 5 hours ago [-]
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.
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
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.
fc417fc802 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
plaguuuuuu 1 hours ago [-]
I'll carry an ammo belt of little EMP devices.
antonvs 42 seconds ago [-]
A microwave weapon could be effective. And reusable.
vasco 3 hours ago [-]
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.
SecretDreams 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
DennisP 8 hours ago [-]
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.
andyjohnson0 4 hours ago [-]
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.
boothby 5 hours ago [-]
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.
k4rnaj1k 2 hours ago [-]
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kruffalon 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Terr_ 11 hours ago [-]
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."
DrScientist 1 hours ago [-]
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.
munksbeer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
grey-area 2 hours ago [-]
All war tends toward total war, so that will never happen no. The incentive to break any such agreements is too strong.
justacrow 2 hours ago [-]
Philip K Dick wrote a short story similar to this, "The Defenders".
altmanaltman 2 hours ago [-]
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.
1 hours ago [-]
Morromist 12 hours ago [-]
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.
phtrivier 36 minutes ago [-]
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 ?
AlecSchueler 1 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
marcus_holmes 10 hours ago [-]
The more important fact is that China makes all the drones
LanceJones 7 hours ago [-]
But also more deaths. It's the delta that's important.
vasco 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mjcohen 10 hours ago [-]
If you believe them.
seydor 1 hours ago [-]
I love peter zeihan but he 's not an oracle
hatthew 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
3 hours ago [-]
dyauspitr 6 hours ago [-]
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.
theshrike79 4 hours ago [-]
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.
AussieWog93 28 minutes ago [-]
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%.
dyauspitr 6 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
Markoff 3 hours ago [-]
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...
thatguy0900 10 hours ago [-]
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
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.
dmurray 17 hours ago [-]
A year ago this [0] table tennis robot backed by Google DeepMind was discussed on HN.
It plays much worse and the HN discussion is anchored around whether it's OK to call it "human-level" or if the authors should have clarified that they meant a human who doesn't actually play table tennis. But it was accepted as being SOTA at that time.
What happened since then? This looks like the kind of level of advance we see in, say, coding AIs, but I thought physical robotics was advancing much more slowly.
A partial answer is that the new robot cheats in ways that DeepMind didn't seem to. It has high speed cameras all over the room and can detect spin by observing the logo on the ball. But I'm not sure this explains such a big advance.
As a human player (of a not-high standard) I cannot see the spin of the ball directly. I can only infer it from the movement of my opponents bat. So I would wonder that a camera could pick it up in real time.
Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
throwup238 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
user3939382 9 hours ago [-]
Settled how? Tabs win, right?
scythe 9 hours ago [-]
go fmt
paolovictor 10 hours ago [-]
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)
hermitcrab 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
Foobar8568 5 hours ago [-]
In french, we call that ping pong too. So yeah for ping pong.
pil0u 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mcmoor 9 hours ago [-]
Lmao the character used is so cute
neosat 12 hours ago [-]
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.
QuantumGood 12 hours ago [-]
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.
stavros 10 hours ago [-]
I can't parse that sentence, can you please clarify?
thatguy0900 10 hours ago [-]
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
stavros 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
QuantumGood 9 hours ago [-]
Apologies! I left a much clearer edit on screen, and when I noticed I had not commited it, the edit window had closed.
乒乓. I don't know how it could be more clear that it's not "table tennis".
jamesjyu 6 hours ago [-]
It was actually called ping pong until it became a trademark dispute, and the sport had to call it table tennis!
segmondy 10 hours ago [-]
It's ping pong.
thenthenthen 3 hours ago [-]
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
james_marks 8 hours ago [-]
Ping Pong is what you play for fun in the basement. The competitive sport is Table Tennis.
4gotunameagain 5 hours ago [-]
This is like software developers who write javascript wanting to be called engineers, isn't it
avadodin 55 minutes ago [-]
Erm, excuse me?
The professional engineering language is called TypeScript.
JavaScript is what you use to add popups to your GeoCities WebSite.
ReptileMan 3 hours ago [-]
Vibe code
bombcar 11 hours ago [-]
It’s miniature table pickleball.
dataflow 11 hours ago [-]
> Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
Is it also MOVING STAIRCASE, NOT ESCALATOR?
zhouzhao 3 hours ago [-]
It's pīngpāng.
davebren 12 hours ago [-]
The ball trajectory gives the spin
BrandoElFollito 13 hours ago [-]
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
aaron695 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
amandle 14 hours ago [-]
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."
_doctor_love 13 hours ago [-]
I used to love Mitch Hedberg. I still do, but I used to, too.
EGreg 12 hours ago [-]
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
mjcohen 10 hours ago [-]
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.
_doctor_love 12 hours ago [-]
Put up in a place
where it is easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T
¨
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time
-- Piet Hein
jimt1234 12 hours ago [-]
If you don't like a parade, run in the opposite direction to fast-forward it.
I'll be impressed when it's a humanoid robot that has to contend with similar kinematic limitations as a human player.
alexose 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the dang thing can reach all the way to the net while standing three feet behind the table
halfnhalf 14 hours ago [-]
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.
ACCount37 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Ferret7446 11 hours ago [-]
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
ACCount37 5 hours ago [-]
Oh, they can. They just need a human touch to actually improve.
For now. It's a work in progress.
zingar 12 hours ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 10 hours ago [-]
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.
dethos 3 hours ago [-]
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.
LeCompteSftware 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, you're dead on:
Rui Takenaka, an elite-level player who has won and lost matches against Ace, said in comments provided by Sony AI: "When it came to my serve, if I used a serve with complex spin, Ace also returned the ball with complex spin, which made it difficult for me. But when I used a simple serve - what we call a knuckle serve - Ace returned a simpler ball. That made it easier for me to attack on the third shot, and I think that was the key reason why I was able to win."
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.
hermitcrab 13 hours ago [-]
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.
dethos 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nilslindemann 2 hours ago [-]
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 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.
lucidrains 13 hours ago [-]
quite surprised to see SAC, considering the deepmind ping pong paper resorted to evolutionary strategies, iirc
> 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?
Jtarii 32 seconds ago [-]
Would assume the top amateur players that don't play professionally.
throwatdem12311 8 hours ago [-]
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.
efskap 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mgfist 8 hours ago [-]
> Clankers play hockey against eachother at a Clanker Olympics
Well actually hockey in particular could be entertaining, depending on how they play.
throwatdem12311 8 hours ago [-]
Robocops vs Terminators maybe
fc417fc802 3 hours ago [-]
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.
NitpickLawyer 4 hours ago [-]
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.
arjunthazhath 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
7 hours ago [-]
thenthenthen 3 hours ago [-]
Is that a legal serve?
metadat 13 hours ago [-]
Is there a video of this in action? Pictures are not satisfying at all!
Am I correct in my understanding that- they had specialized software that not only tracked the ball, calculated spins using the logo, and fed calculated trajectories?
fourthark 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, using nine specialized cameras. Still very impressive but the human is overmatched on equipment alone.
13 hours ago [-]
chasil 12 hours ago [-]
What happens when two of them play each other?
How easy is it to introduce artifacts that reduce accuracy and performance?
Well, I guess we’re going to fire all the Ping-pong players at the office and replace them with these robots.
finger 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder if a top player with access to a robot like this can get an extra edge in training?
hermitcrab 13 hours ago [-]
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.
allthetime 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jedberg 12 hours ago [-]
It's an amazing feat of engineering because it requires constant micro-adjustments, something that robots couldn't do a few years ago.
allthetime 12 hours 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.
throwatdem12311 8 hours ago [-]
Coming soon to an ICE Goon Squad near you!
hydrolox 12 hours ago [-]
isn't this a technology forum?
allthetime 12 hours ago [-]
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.
aldielshala 8 hours ago [-]
Finally an AI that takes someone's job and nobody's upset about it.
OisinMoran 10 hours ago [-]
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
tantalor 13 hours ago [-]
> 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!
tartoran 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jimt1234 12 hours ago [-]
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.
The greatest blernsball player was a machine for playing blernsball.
runicelf 11 hours ago [-]
Now we need to find out if the robot can win against the wall
amelius 13 hours ago [-]
AI gets all the fun jobs. Yet again.
Now build a robot that can catch a bullet.
RijilV 13 hours ago [-]
careful what you wish for.
13 hours ago [-]
vova_hn2 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jillesvangurp 8 hours ago [-]
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.
_carbyau_ 8 hours ago [-]
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....
throwatdem12311 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Case in point : we're all expecting China needs to invade Taiwan soon, or they will run out of soldiers because of the one child policies of the 70s/80s.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is holding up against a "modern" army with quickly assembled drones.
So it all seems a bit like "they'll never put tanks through the Ardennes", sort of ?
Where and when will the first invasion of a country by a purely remote controlled, AI assisted army take place ?
Will robot battalions embed civilians to act as human shields ? Will the AI learn to mistreat the locals to maintain fear, or will they see it as a needless distraction and rush to the center of powers ?
If war is mostly played out from a disrance, will years of playing RTS give South Korea an edge ?
I left a company because they pivoted to exactly this. There are so many companies in this space today, testing what they call "physical AI autonomy" today, and we have to recognize that this is our today.
There are entire marketplace options for buying the pretrained, supported, private models, or the datasets if you have your own goals. If you're interested purely in ditzing around with GPS denied, or communications lost, you can do that today.
I watched a demo video, in March where a company was sharing their remote instructed (note, not controlled) multiple format (spider, dog) robot swarm. The company claimed to be 35km away from where the drones dropped off the payloads, and the mission was engaged. Lightweight explosives were used to toss off a car.
This is our present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror)
My concern is the cottage industry of integrating guns with half baked AI at the lowest cost. And probably vibe coded too.
The companies don't care - a sale is a sale. MoD maybe doesn't care - 90% accuracy and less human casualties on their own side are a win. Governments want to save money and by the time they find out the robots go rogue, it will be too late to do anything about it.
YoloV8 + optical flow works fine on an esp32. You want to give a drone rough coordinates for a refinery and hit something in it, like a storage tank? That'll work. This means, give it 5 years, relatively small groups will have access to it. This cannot be stopped.
The only real answer is to work to have groups that you can trust to have access to this first.
How will this help exactly?
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?
https://archive.is/dpNsN
An optimized quadruped could probably be built for the same price and have an integrated 60mm mortar instead. The front legs act as the bipod and the rear legs would be designed to dig into the ground for stabilization. The only problem here is reloading the mortar, which could be done using a revolver style magazine. That's 5 shots per robot vs 1 per drone.
>Marching humanoid terminator robots
ground bots, not necessarily marching, do have their value. They can have bulletproof armor, while still be relatively lightweight and small and fast. They can easily carry even 20-25mm autocannon - very destructive weapon, sometimes can even succeed against a real tank.
And imagine when a swarm of drones lifts a ground bot, brings and drops it right into the needed point and protects it from the enemy drones while the ground bot just destructs the things around. Synergy between different weapons system has always been the super-weapon.
Still more cost effective than a humanoid robot, even in the presence of hundreds of doors.
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.
If money or economics were relevant in these decisions, most wars would probably not play out in the first place. Tesla probably wouldn't be worth 1.2T. And we certainly wouldn't see AI buildouts happening at their current rates.
Economics and costs only matter for normal humans, small countries, and efforts that might actually help humanity. They're not seemingly considerations in nefarious applications.
This is a lesson the US has yet to learn, and its military drones are really expensive. Ukraine learned it by necessity, and now it's building millions of drones annually.
I don't understand what you mean here.
Aren't wars fought over natural resources or the political power over natural resources.
Obviously people sometimes miscalculate but in principle I mean.
"Citizen, congratulations on reaching your age of majority. Report for your Patriotic Assurance Implant at surgical bay 43B."
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.
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.
My big question is:
- will they keep the human bodies warm to care for the elderly, and send robots to war ?
- will they keep the robots to take care of the elderly, and send the young's to war ?
- will they dispose f the elderly to keep their edge ?
- will they play long and wait things out ?
> It's clear that China is going to use tech
I hear this all the time but the invasion never seems to come. Is it just western projection at this point?
Not sure if this is serious, but RTS skills are different from real-world battlefield skills. Macro is completely different, and while micro skills might be slightly transferrable, computers are so much better that no human will ever be microing real units on a real battlefield.
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.
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...
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-position-take...
I kinda think that the competitions among the big dogs (US/Russia/China/etc.) would eventually green light ANY AI/Robots projects if they can justify tipping the scale somehow, and in the process completely destroys the last element of any political counter-weight. Because "fear gives men wings".
I would really hate to live in a dystopian world worse than what is described in the books/movies.
It plays much worse and the HN discussion is anchored around whether it's OK to call it "human-level" or if the authors should have clarified that they meant a human who doesn't actually play table tennis. But it was accepted as being SOTA at that time.
What happened since then? This looks like the kind of level of advance we see in, say, coding AIs, but I thought physical robotics was advancing much more slowly.
A partial answer is that the new robot cheats in ways that DeepMind didn't seem to. It has high speed cameras all over the room and can detect spin by observing the logo on the ball. But I'm not sure this explains such a big advance.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43861207
Also IT'S TABLE TENNIS, NOT PING PONG!
Alas HN has finally found its next religious war!
I’ve been feeling a little bored after that whole tabs vs spaces one was settled.
(Also, you sorta can infer the spin from the ball arc or even if you catch a glimpse of the rotating label)
Some people say they can see the spin from the rotating logo. I can't.
For example, backspin/underspin balls will move slower after the first bounce and feel 'damper' while topspin will jump. So it's def. possible (and in fact reliable) to read the spin from the spin and trajectory of the ball.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH8kZDc7OLk
The professional engineering language is called TypeScript.
JavaScript is what you use to add popups to your GeoCities WebSite.
Is it also MOVING STAIRCASE, NOT ESCALATOR?
Interestingly, for Youtube searches this is the other way, with a much bigger difference in favour to ping pong
When he was a little boy he never played out in the streets of Votkinsk like the other little children of Votkinsk, because when Tchaikovsky was one month old, his parents moved to St. Petersburg.
— Victor Borge
where it is easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T
When you feel how depressinglyslowly you climb
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time
-- Piet Hein
And, like many AIs, it can have "jagged capability" gaps, with inhuman failure modes living in them - which humans can learn to exploit, but the robot wouldn't adapt to their exploitation because it doesn't learn continuously. Happened with various types of ML AIs designed to fight humans.
For now. It's a work in progress.
I wonder how much practice these players had against the machine in the weeks leading up to the actual game. That would be significant to ensure they are playing at their pro level.
As I mentioned in a previous comment, it would be important to know how many weeks of preparation and training against this sort of robot the player had before the match.
Here a video where one can actually see the robot in action:
https://youtu.be/lWp6XNHaWRk
Why only physical labour? There might be a lot of admin or thought labour (non physical) that we don't want to do either.
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.
What exactly is an "elite" player, if it's not a professional?
Would anyone ever watch Clankers play hockey against eachother at a Clanker Olympics? The idea is absurd, I want to see humans competing because they are humans not just because they are good.
If a txt2vid model could generate a 100% perfect video of a soccer match, perfectly rendering each blade of grass, would anyone watch it? No, because we care about the team and the stories of the players. Not just the spectacle being shown.
Well actually hockey in particular could be entertaining, depending on how they play.
Are you seriously telling me you wouldn't enjoy watching mechas going at it with greatswords? As a bonus (as suggested regarding cars by another commenter) mount explosive charges to weak points that must be defended.
I was expecting/hoping for a humanoid robot.
Reminds me of this old The Onion story: https://theonion.com/ping-pong-somehow-elicits-macho-posturi...
https://sonyresearch.github.io/ace_public/
How easy is it to introduce artifacts that reduce accuracy and performance?
> Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns. I mean come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but programmable bat on wheels.
> Oh? And I suppose Pitch-o-mat 5000 was just a modifier howitzer?
> Yep!
(Linking that one as it's the first in which any of the teams completed the entire course)
Now build a robot that can catch a bullet.
We had machines "beating" humans in physical tasks for a very long time. No one would be impressed by a car winning a running competition or a construction crane lifting more weight than an Olympic weightlifting champion.
These are not the clumsy robots of a few years ago that could only do simple, pre-programmed tasks and had to work in fenced off areas because they had no awareness of anything around them (including fragile people) but self stabilizing, inhumanly fast running robots that can operate in any kind of environment and adapt to a wide variety of tasks. And then complete those tasks at very high precision and speed.
However, the point here is not that it makes a sport redundant, but that a type of observation, calculation, and movement has been achieved.
I for one hope to see this tech in action from the customer side of a teppanyaki restaurant. It won't replace the humour of a good human teppanyaki chef but maybe I'll be able to afford it....