Punk Rock Robots Rock Out to Punk Rock ONLY

Making robots even more hardcore, British roboticists have designed machines that will only dance to punk rock music. Standing 2 metres tall, padded in leather and decked in various punk scene insignias, the pogoing robots wait until they hear the familiar strains of anti-establishment rock before they start dancing. Is it just me, or do these things sound like they’d be a minor threat in the mosh pit?

The machines were designed by a collaboration of artists and scientists from Queen Mary University in London. They use neural networks, a collection of computer processors that function like a simple animal brain, to differentiate between Black Flag and say… Bob Marley. The result: robots that can dance to a genre of music even if they’ve never heard the song before. Check out the BBC link to see a video of the robots gleefully pogoing to The Fumadores. [BBC]