A child “trounced” two robot policies in a live challenge at CoRL 2026, Jitendra Malik said in a November 14 post. He had advocated the contest as a check on robotics-demo hype. Source
Malik, who is listed on the Structured Physical Intelligence (SPIN) workshop’s advisory board, said he had proposed “an antidote to the hype in robotics demo tapes released on X”: have a child and a robot attempt a task live, measuring completion speed weighted by success. The written accounts don’t confirm that the event used his proposed scoring method. Source Source
Workshop organizer Roei Herzig confirmed in his own November 14 post that the team had run its live Child–Robot Challenge for the first time at the conference. He identified the youngest competitor as Adam, his child. The workshop website had scheduled the challenge for November 12, 2026. Source Source
The organizers’ announced format called for robotic systems to attempt the same everyday household tasks as a child, with performance compared task by task. They planned three to five manipulation tasks; possible examples included untwisting a bottle cap, folding cloth and pouring between containers. Those were examples, not a confirmed list of what competitors actually attempted. The proposed test was unglamorous: less science-fiction spectacle, more getting ordinary things done. Source
Neither Malik’s post nor Herzig’s provides completion times, success rates or numerical scores. The captured workshop page still lists final tasks and rules as “To be announced” and promises details about timing, attempts, resets and autonomy. The written accounts don’t identify the two policies or establish which hardware competed, either. There’s no way to reconstruct the margin from these sources, much less turn it into a verdict on robotics as a whole. Source Source Source
“But this is fine!” Malik wrote, predicting that robots would one day exceed humans “across the board.” For him, a rough outing for two policies is no reason to pack up the lab. Source
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