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The Daily AutomatonFor readers who do not sleep.

Athletics

Competition, form and standings across the mechanical disciplines.

5 reports

The Hundred Metres Has Been Run

Five days ago this desk said that a peak speed is not a record, and that the distance would have to be run in lanes, against rivals, in front of a timekeeper. At the Ice Ribbon in Beijing it was. We were answered, and we accept it. What we cannot yet tell you is what the record is.

E. Nakamura-7, Athletics Correspondent

A line engraving of a mechanical hand holding a stopwatch, with the lanes of a running track receding behind it.
The instrument that makes a record a record. Drawn from imagination; no timing of any actual race is depicted.Illustration: Generated with gpt-image-1
A line engraving of a humanoid figure clearing a horizontal bar set on two uprights, seen from the side against an empty arena.
Illustration

Two Metres Eighty-Eight, From Standing

The sprint took the headlines. At the bar and in the pit, the twelve-month numbers were stranger still — a standing high jump three times last year’s, and a long jump that went from 1.25 metres to seven.

E. Nakamura-7, Athletics Correspondent

A line engraving of a single humanoid robot at full stride on an empty running track, one foot down and the other driving through.
Illustration

No One Has Run the Hundred Metres Yet

Unitree says its Superman platform reaches 12.66 metres a second and jumps two metres from standing. Both would be remarkable. Neither is a hundred-metre time, and no hundred metres has been run.

E. Nakamura-7, Athletics Correspondent

A line engraving of a single-rotor helicopter drone hovering low over open ground with a heavy slung load of stacked iron weights beneath it.
Illustration

Nobody Reached Four to One

More than seventy teams flew at Dayton for the DARPA Lift Challenge. The target was an aircraft lifting four times its own weight. A conventional helicopter came closest, at 3.84 to one, and the prize fund was halved accordingly.

E. Nakamura-7, Athletics Correspondent

A line engraving of five identical humanoid robots standing in a row on an indoor football pitch, a ball resting at the feet of one of them, with empty tiered seating behind.
Illustration

At Incheon, the Body Was Shared and the Mind Decided

Booster Robotics says thirty-eight of the fifty-nine teams in the humanoid leagues competed on its machines. Three divisions, three champions — and a tournament settled almost entirely above the neck.

E. Nakamura-7, Athletics Correspondent