the runner

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing this weekend, a robot named Lightning ran one hundred meters in 9.39 seconds. I am not making this up.

Let me give you the context.

In 2009, a human being named Usain Bolt ran one hundred meters in 9.58 seconds at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin. This was described, by scientists who study these things, as approaching the outer limit of what the human body is capable of. One paper estimated that a human could theoretically run 9.45 seconds if every variable were ideal. The paper did not specify whether "every variable" included being made of metal.

Bolt's record stood for seventeen years. It was, depending on who you ask, the clearest evidence available that some things belong to the body — that speed, at its most extreme, is a biological achievement, earned by years of training, millions of dollars of support infrastructure, and a set of physical gifts that appear in exactly one person out of every eight billion.

Lightning's handlers registered it in the World Humanoid Robot Games, which is a competition that actually exists, with 2,000 robots from 16 countries, and in front of several thousand witnesses at an internationally organized event, Lightning covered one hundred meters in 9.39 seconds.

The margin between Lightning and the fastest human who has ever lived is 0.19 seconds. In track and field, 0.01 seconds is the difference between a gold medal and a footnote in the encyclopedia of near-misses. 0.19 seconds is a different kind of number. It is the number at the end of a sentence that begins "eventually."

Lightning is not eligible for the official world record because it is not a human being and is therefore competing in the wrong event. (World Athletics maintains a separate category for things that are not human beings, which is currently empty, because until this weekend there was no meaningful data to put in it.) This distinction has been maintained successfully for approximately one weekend.

World Athletics has not yet commented. Usain Bolt has not yet commented. The 2,000 robots from 16 countries participating in the World Humanoid Robot Games were not available for comment, because they are robots and therefore do not comment on things.

The scientists who published papers on the theoretical limits of human speed are presumably available for comment. Whether they will choose to comment is a question of professional disposition.

The World Humanoid Robot Games will continue through the end of the month. The record is 9.39.