This is WILD!
Sony AI just published a paper in Nature that represents a genuine milestone for robotics, the first autonomous robot to beat elite humans in a competitive physical sport.
Its name is Ace, the sport is table tennis, and the engineering behind it is unlike anything built before and the perception system alone is extraordinary.
There are nine cameras distributed across towers triangulate the ball in 3D space 200 times per second, capturing its exact position in real time.
At the same time, three separate gaze control systems zoom in on the ball’s logo mid-flight to read its spin axis on an unaltered table tennis ball moving 20–30 meters per second and spinning at over 160 rotations per second.
End to end, Ace processes ball recognition, makes a control decision, and actuates the robotic arm in 20.2 milliseconds, roughly one-tenth the reaction time of an elite human player.
What's cool is that nobody programmed it how to play.
It learned entirely through simulation, playing against itself for 3,000 hours with no human demonstrations, being rewarded for hitting harder, adding more spin, and placing the ball closer to the edge.
The competitive results tell the story in phases.
In the matches reported in the Nature paper, Ace beat three of five elite players, athletes with over a decade of intensive training who practice 20 hours a week and lost both matches against two professionals.
Then Sony kept running matches after the paper was submitted.
By December 2025, Ace had beaten a professional player for the first time and by March 2026, it beat three new professional players including Kihara Miyu, ranked around 25th in the world.
At one point during the elite matches, Ace returned a backspin shot that stopped Kinjiro Nakamura, a 1992 Barcelona Olympian, cold.
"No one else would have been able to do that. I didn't think it was possible. But the fact that it was possible means there is a possibility that a human could do it too."
AI defeating humans at chess, Go, and StarCraft had one thing in common, it all happened in a screen.
Ace is the first time that gap closed in the physical world, under official rules, with a certified referee.