Successful athletic performance requires precision in many respects. A batter stands behind home plate awaiting the arrival of a ball that is smaller than three inches in diameter and moving close to 100 miles per hour. His goal is to hit the ball with a bat that is also smaller than three inches in diameter. This impressive feat requires extraordinary temporal and spatial coordination. The sweet spot of the bat must be at the same place, at the same time, as the ball. A basketball player must keep a ball bouncing as she speeds from one end of the court to the other, evading defensive players. She may never break pace as she lifts from the ground, throwing the ball fifteen feet toward a hoop eighteen inches in diameter.

Familiarity with professional-level play might lead one to lose sight of the exactness of the skills involved. For a good and amusing remedy to this, watch a few minutes of the Robocup. This annual soccer tournament matches teams consisting of the most technologically advanced robots on Earth. The robots shuffle around the field, slowly. They occasionally bump into each other, causing one or both to fall down. Whereas a human soccer player moves smoothly toward a ball, never breaking stride as she controls it with her foot until lofting a pass to a player downfield, the robot’s encounter with the ball is anything but fluid. It stops in front of the ball, inspecting it as though it’s some unknown object that has just fallen from outer space. It bounces from foot to foot before carefully orienting itself just so. The kick, when it finally comes, sends the ball rolling a few feet, typically in a random direction. If it hasn’t fallen on its butt, the robot freezes, its …