Einstein Learns How to Smile

A realistic Albert Einstein robot — complete with bushy mustache and wild gray hair — has taught itself how to smile, frown and make other human expressions. It's not alive, per se, but uses a process of experimentation and reward. Previously, the scientists at the University of California, San Diego (who created the robot), had to program each of the 31 artificial face muscles individually to get so much as a smirk, according to an article by Wired.

Get ready to be fascinated, and a little creeped out:

When Robot Einstein randomly contorts its face and eventually hits on a recognizable humanlike expression, facial recognition software attached to a camera gives it "reward" feedback. The robot then remembers the expression and the corresponding emotion.

"It's an iterative process," said facial-recognition expert Marian Bartlett, a co-author of the study. "It starts out completely random and then gets feedback. Next time the robot picks an expression, there's a bias towards putting the motors in the right configuration."

After the robot figured out the relationship between different muscle movements and known facial expressions, it started experimenting with new expressions, such as eyebrow narrowing.

In case this sounds like a bunch of geeks sinking thousands of hours into something just for kicks, one of the intended applications of the technology is to better understand how infants learn to recognize and replicate facial expressions. Beyond that, they hope the silicon-brained Einstein eventually will learn how to interact with humans as a tutor.

But with unemployment reaching 10 percent, do we really need more robots competing for our jobs?