At UC Berkeley, researchers in Sergey Levine’s Robotic AI and Learning Lab eyed a table where a tower of 39 Jenga blocks stood perfectly stacked. Then a white-and-black robot, its single limb doubled over like a hunched-over giraffe, zoomed toward the tower, brandishing a black leather whip.

Through what might have seemed to a casual viewer like a miracle of physics, the whip struck in precisely the right spot to send a single block flying out from the stack while the rest of the tower remained structurally sound.

This task, known as “Jenga whipping,” is a hobby pursued by people with the dexterity and reflexes to pull it off. Now, it’s been mastered by robots, thanks to a novel, AI-powered training method.