United Kingdom, May 3 -- A table tennis-playing robot has demonstrated the ability to defeat elite human ping pong players.

Marking what researchers describe as a breakthrough moment for artificial intelligence in real-world sport, the Sony Ace cyborg, developed by Sony, is a paddle-wielding robotic arm.

It was tested against professional athletes at the company's headquarters in Tokyo, where an Olympic-size table tennis court was constructed for the experiments.

Equipped with nine high-speed cameras and eight articulated joints, the bot was designed to replicate human-level play while relying on reinforcement learning to improve its performance through experience.

The findings of its game, published in Nature, come amid wider global ...