Pay attention Marty SupremeThere’s a new contender for the throne of table tennis champion, and it’s not human. Research today shows the robot can match the best elite human players.
Scientists from Sony’s artificial intelligence department have developed an autonomous robot system called Ace. Their study details how Ace wins most of the matches against highly experienced table tennis players, despite coming up short against professional athletes. Besides innovation, the software and hardware that make the robot possible could have many other purposes, its creators say.
“The results of our work on Ace highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains that require fast, accurate human-robot interactions,” lead author Peter Dürr told Gizmodo.
Ace at court
AI-based systems can now routinely beat humans at all kinds of tasks, including games. Historically, it has been difficult to design robots intelligent and agile enough to outperform humans in physical sports. Table tennis in particular requires quick reaction times and the ability to create high-spin balls that are accurate but hard to return to opponents.
Scientists have been toying with the possibility of tennis robots since the 1980s, but according to Dürr, ACE is an important step forward for both artificial intelligence and robotics.
“Sony AI conducted this research to learn how AI can work safely and effectively in the physical world, where perception, control and agility must be combined in real time,” he said. “Unlike simulated environments where AI can rely on perfect data, real-world sports like table tennis require rapid decision-making based on state assessment of noisy sensors and hostile human interactions.”
Unlike past experiments, the researchers judged Ace’s performance against humans using current International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) rules; they also employed licensed referees to oversee the games.
In this study, conducted in April 2025, researchers paired Ace with five players considered elite, defined as people with at least 10 years of playing experience and an average of 20 hours of regular practice per week. He also faced Minami Ando and Kakeru Sone, two players active in Japan’s professional table tennis league.
Ace won three out of five matches against elite players. Won one match against the Professor, eventually losing both matches against Ando and Sone. And throughout the matches, the robot demonstrated agile movements and was able to consistently serve and return high-velocity and high-spinning balls. These were the team’s findings has been published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Future champion?
The team’s experiences did not end there.
Ace played another set of games in December 2025, where he was able to defeat both elite and professional players (winning one of two professional matches). In March 2026, she won three matches against professionals, including Miyuu Kihara, who is currently a top 25 player in the World Table Tennis Women’s Singles Rankings. According to Dürr, during these matches, Ace showed improved performance in hitting balls faster and more aggressively closer to the edge of the table.
Still, Ace probably won’t take over the table tennis world. The project was designed as a way for researchers to push the individual technologies that drive Ace as far as they could, rather than any specific goal. But lessons learned from Ace could allow scientists to build better robotic systems for a variety of “applications in sports, entertainment and other safety-critical physical domains,” Dürr said.
Thankfully, I’ve always been complete rubbish at ping pong/ping pong, so I’m happy to accept Ace as our new robot overlord just in case.
