MARVIN the Paranoid Android is made flesh. Well, almost. The new bot isn’t as pitiful as Douglas Adams’s brainchild in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But it is capable of feeling disappointed.
Its creator designed the robot to mimic the “happy” feeling you get when you’re rewarded. And just like its living cousins, the robot feels let down when it expects a treat and doesn’t get one.
Olaf Sporns at Indiana University in Bloomington has wired his robot so it can see, approach and grip coloured objects, and then test their conductivity. If the conductivity is low, the robot…
