{"id":387936,"date":"2026-04-19T23:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T23:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/387936\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T23:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T23:52:09","slug":"robots-beat-human-records-at-beijing-half-marathon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/387936\/","title":{"rendered":"Robots beat human records at Beijing half-marathon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds \u2014 significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Comparing human and robot running times may seem unfair; one social media user <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/terrible.moe\/post\/3mjt64lzx5c2e\" target=\"_blank\">observed<\/a>, \u201cmy car can outrun a cheetah too.\u201d Still, the winning time is a massive improvement over last year\u2019s race, when <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/04\/19\/robots-run-a-half-marathon-slowly\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the fastest robot finished in two hours and 40 minutes<\/a>. (Back then, I scoffed that this \u201cwould not be an impressive time for a human.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/abcnews.com\/International\/wireStory\/humanoid-robot-sprints-victory-beijing-beating-human-half-132179294\" target=\"_blank\">The Associated Press reports<\/a> that this year\u2019s winner was built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn\u2019t actually the fastest, as a different Honor robot finished in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But that one was remote controlled \u2014 the 50:26 robot was autonomous and won due to weighted scoring.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">About 40% of participating robots competed autonomously, while the remaining 60% were remote controlled, according to Beijing\u2019s E-Town tech hub. Not all of them did as well as Honor\u2019s robots, with one robot falling at the starting line and another hitting a barrier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,200901,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-387936","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-beijing-humanoid-half-marathon","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}