🎮 Sony AI’s robot Ace beats top table tennis players

Sony AI published a Nature paper on Ace, a table tennis robot that now wins against elite players. In April 2025 it won about half of matches. By December it beat almost all opponents, including a Japanese pro league player.

Ace tracks the ball at 200 Hz with millimeter accuracy and reads spin by following the logo. End-to-end latency is 20.2 ms, around 11x faster than human reaction at ~230 ms. Balls can reach 150 km/h, so each return is computed in milliseconds.

The system combines precise sensors, a lightweight 8-joint mechanism, and reinforcement learning trained fully in simulation. Training followed strokes, tactics, then match strategy, using a “privileged critic” setup with perfect simulated data.

Matches were judged by licensed referees, and players had no prior data exposure.

A real-world version of move 37 has arrived.

📊 @tech