Leather clad robots will only pogo to punk rock

Davey Winder
Sunday, 06 July 2008 06:58

Science - Biology

Professor McOwan of Queen Mary University, a computational neuroscientist, helped Fiddian create the robots. "The idea is to look at the information processing strategies that have taken billions of years to develop through evolution, steal them and put them into computers" he told the BBC. In the case of the robots, having been trained to appreciate the music of the punk genre, the hope is that in the frenzy of a live performance they will be able to react to the amount of punk in each song. The more punk, the more pogoing.

But what is the point of the pogoing robotic punks, other than to prove it can be done? According to Fiddian there are many things to be explored with this particular exercise, including:

• Analogies between human and computer learning and memory, brought into sharp focus by placing robots, controlled by Neural Networks, within an audience of humans
• Disparities and analogies between organic and technological embodied systems that appreciate punk and physically react have a strong cultural and social impact
• The workings of neural-network systems, analogous to human cognitive function, which are trained, or taught, with ‘classic punk’: however they are flexible enough to learn and change there taste (or level of ‘enjoyment’) during the course of performances
• The debate around cognition, its embodiment and how human physiology and computer neural networks differ. The robots have mutable memory and learn through experience. What are we compared to the experience-empowered robot and what would we be if that memory were removed?