Article Lead Image

Guess who wins when a Ping-Pong champ takes on a robot

It’s the ultimate showdown of ultimate Ping-Pong.

 

Michelle Jaworski

Internet Culture

Posted on Mar 11, 2014   Updated on May 31, 2021, 3:50 pm CDT

It’s the ultimate showdown of ultimate Ping-Pong.

The rivalry between man and machine comes to a head when professional table tennis player Timo Boll is pitted against the KR Agilus, a robot arm from German company Kuka in a game of table tennis. Sadly, instead of a real match, viewers were given a heavily-edited commercial more focused on random camera shots than any semblance of game. 

It appears that Boll is in danger of losing the game he until starts to take advantage of Agilus’s limitations and places the ball out of its reach.

It ends up being a close game and results in a shot that’s worth all of the theatrics.

If the machine wins? Well, there are plenty of movies that show what can go wrong.

Photo via KukaRobotGroup/YouTube

Share this article
*First Published: Mar 11, 2014, 12:06 pm CDT