Stroll by a strip mall arcade or the local Dave & Buster's, look behind the noisy kids playing Dance Dance Revolution, and you'll likely spot an air hockey table. Like Pac-Man and the maddening claw game, air hockey remains unchanged and everlasting. Two facts seem to endear us to the floating puck: 1) everyone thinks they're good at the game but 2) nobody knows for sure. Nowhere in the sports landscape are so many goals scored upon oneself. A 6-0 victory in one game is reversed in the next battle, thanks entirely to Lady Luck. But when you compete against the Air Hockey Bot 1000 (AHB-1000), a career once dictated by fickle fortune can finally be tested against formulaic consistency.

Something incredible is happening in a lab at Duke University’s Center for Neuroengineering—though, at first, it’s hard to see just what it is. A robot arm swings from side to side, eerily lifelike, as if it were trying to snatch invisible flies out of the air. It pivots around and straightens as it extends its mechanical hand. The hand clamp shuts and squeezes for a few seconds, then relaxes its grip and pulls back to shoot out again in a new direction.