An autonomous robot ping-pong player dubbed Ace has achieved a milestone for AI and robotics in Tokyo by competing against and sometimes defeating top-level human players at table tennis, a feat that could presage an array of other applications for similarly adept robots.

Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony's (6758.T), opens new tab AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid ‌decisions and precision execution, the project's leader said. Ace did so by employing high-speed perception, AI-based control and a state-of-the-art robotic system.

A curated list of modern alternatives to classic command-line tools.

Faster, prettier, smarter replacements for the Unix utilities you use every day.

If you’ve ever spent any length of time in a tall building—either because you live or work in one—you probably know this feeling: The elevator’s cars always seem to go in the wrong direction. If you want to go down, there’s an elevator going up, and vice versa.

The phenomenon intrigued physicists George Gamow and Marvin Stern in the mid-1950s.

Mozilla says it used an early version of Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview to comb through Firefox's code, and the results were hard to ignore. In Firefox 150, the team fixed 271 vulnerabilities identified during this effort, a number that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Instead of relying only on fuzzing tools or human review, the AI was able to reason through code and surface issues that typically require highly specialized expertise.

Shellscape is an online web app that simulates a terminal environment for learning Linux shell commands. It has 31 levels of increasing difficulty that work entirely on the frontend without needing any virtual machines or installations.

In Serbia, we say “zimi-zami-zum”. When “zum” is said, everyone shows either a fist (like rock) or a relaxed palm (like paper). This is played by 3 players. The odd one out (eg. the lone palm vs. 2 fists) is “it”. We can scale this up to more players by deciding that the majority is eliminated and the minority moves to the next round. Repeat this process until there are fewer than 3 people remaining.