A humanoid robot ran the 100 meters faster than any human ever has on Saturday, as the second World Humanoid Robot Games opened at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval. Tiangong Ultra, built by the state-backed Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, won its preliminary heat in 9.39 seconds, dipping under the 9.58-second mark Usain Bolt set at the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin.
Tiangong Ultra was not alone under the old mark. Lightning, a rival machine built by smartphone maker Honor, finished the same heat in 9.47 seconds. In a trial run before the games, Lightning had already posted 9.32 seconds at a peak speed of 14.5 meters per second, after engineers lengthened its legs from 95 centimeters to 1.05 meters ahead of competition.
Lightning was already a familiar face in Chinese robotics circles before Saturday: the same machine won the Beijing half marathon in April, covering 21 kilometers in 50 minutes 26 seconds, a robotics milestone though a distant one next to the human half-marathon record. The sprint heats took place at the National Speed Skating Oval, the venue nicknamed the "Ice Ribbon" that hosted speed skating at the 2022 Winter Olympics and was repurposed this month for machines instead of skaters.
The times mark a sharp jump from the first robot games a year earlier, when the fastest 100-meter run by any humanoid machine was 21.50 seconds — more than double Bolt's time. This year's event drew more than 2,000 robot entries competing across 51 categories, CBS News reported. On Sunday, Tiangong Ultra added a 400-meter run of 38.15 seconds, nearly five seconds faster than the human world record over that distance.
None of the marks count as official athletics records; robotic performances fall outside World Athletics' rulebook, and Bolt's 9.58 seconds remains the fastest 100 meters ever run by a person. But the gap between machine and man is closing faster than most engineers predicted even a year ago, and footage of Saturday's heat spread quickly online, with viewers running side-by-side comparisons against Bolt's 2009 race in Berlin.