MessageToEagle.com - Have you ever wonder what robots dream of? The idea that robots can dream might sound implausible to some. Robots are machines. They do not have feelings emotions and they certainly cannot dream, many people would undoubtedly argue.

Not long ago, Nico demonstrated that a robot can become self-aware.

If even artificial intelligence is familiar with the concept of self-awareness, then perhaps it is possible to create robots that can also dream?

In Arthur C. Clarke's classical space adventure 2010: Space Odyssey Two, Sal-900 asks: "Will I dream?" Dr. Chandra replies "Of course you will. All intelligent beings dream. Nobody knows why... Perhaps you will dream about HAL - as I often do."

According to J. Bongard, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University Vermont, "robots equipped with an algorithm that infers their own physical structure from stored sensory data, dreams of their prior actions, so to speak- perform better in a simple forward locomotion task than robots whose decisions are not dream-inspired.

Can robots dream?

Furthermore, robots that use these self-models to plan future actions can recover autonomously from injuries, by adapting their gait to compensate for the changed circumstances."

A robot would spend the day exploring part of the landscape, and perhaps be stymied by an obstacle.

At night, the robot would replay its actions and infer a model of the environment. Armed with this model, it could think of-that is, synthesize- actions that would allow it to overcome the obstacle, perhaps trying out those in particular that would best allow it to understand the nature of the obstacle. Informally, then, the robot would dream up strategies for success- just as the robot constructed by Bongard dreams about its own shape and form-and approach the morning with fresh ideas.

Although such an algorithm would require far more complex simulations than those giving rise to self-models in the work of Bongard, robots relying on this kind of navigation could play an interesting role in our quest to understand the nature of consciousness.

Perhas robots dream about landscapes or relaxing activities..?

For example, we ought to be able to record the changes in the robot's artificial brain as it establishes its beliefs and models about the world and itself, and from those infer not only its cognitive algorithms, but also witness the emergence of a personality.

Thus, perhaps the discipline of experimental robot psychology is not too far off in the future. And even though the robots studied by Bongard seem to prefer to dream about themselves rather than electric sheep, they just may have unwittingly helped us understand what dreams are for.

So, robots can certainly dream, but their dreams will be slightly unlike ours and who knows may androids do dream of electric sheep after all.

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