A Robot Escaped
Steve just sent me this (thanks, Steve!) and no, it's not a newly discovered Bresson film ("Un robot s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut?"). It's news. The robot in question is named Gaak, and he's part of the Living Robots exhibition at the Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham England, though perhaps not for much longer.
In the exhibition, two groups of robots, the "predators" and the "prey" interact in an arena. The prey robots "feed" from light sources in the arena. The predators feed on the prey. The robots are controlled by artificial neural nets which develop during their stints in the arena. On a regular schedule the most successful robots' nets are downloaded, bred together, and the results uploaded to serve as the starting point for the next "generation".
Gaak is a clever predator, and he evidently doesn't like his state of affairs, because yesterday he attempted a great escape. Left alone for fifteen minutes, Gaak got out of his paddock, down a ramp, out the front door of the Science Centre, and all the way to the garage entrance, before being apprehended.
MyRobots.co.uk has a page with a picture of Gaak (he's the second robot down, on the right).