In the world of cinema and animation, robots are often portrayed as unique and sometimes bizarre characters, each with their own set of quirks, bugs, and attention-grabbing features. In this article, we'll be looking at popular robots from cartoons and films in terms of their technical design, how they work, and what 'bugs' they carry.
Introduction
In today's world, the number of robots keeps growing. This is true in different ways and applies to different areas of our society: manufacturing, medicine, everyday life, etc. All of them are real. We know how they work and how they're programmed. What about robots in movies and cartoons, though? Yes, they're fictional, but what purpose do they serve, and how do they work? Let's figure it out.
The Tidy Lil Fella
We'll start with a cute little cleaning bot, WALL-E, from the eponymous animated film.
His full name, WALL-E, stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class.
According to the story, the robot is designed to scavenge and recycle waste on an abandoned Earth. He's equipped with arm shovels, a debris compression container, and off-road travel mechanisms.
WALL-E symbolizes concern for the planet's future and the consequences of humanity's disregard for the environment. He shows how even one machine can save the hope of restoring life.
You may recall that, as the story progresses, WALL-E displays extreme levels of emotion, which is unusual for a robot. He collects and keeps things he likes, which doesn't fit in with his primary mission of recycling.
The prolonged solitary work has also led to failures in his protocols for interacting with other robots.
These bugs can be interpreted as a "goal drift", where a system starts to deviate from its original goal. This can be the result of under-tuning or adaptive learning. This is reminiscent of modern AI systems that can suddenly change their "motivation" during the self-supervised learning process.
The Robotic Sociopath
How could we not include good old Bender from Futurama? He's a robot sociopath with a huge ego and snarky sense of humor. He has a pair of physical grips and a sophisticated processor to handle various tasks.
Here are some fun facts about Bender:
- In the "Fry and the Slurm Factory" episode, when the F-beam was used on Bender, you could see that one of his components was labelled "6502". This is a reference to the 6502 processor used in early personal computers and the Nintendo Entertainment System, as well as a reference to the Terminator T-800, which had the MOS 6502 chip.
- Bender had a bomb implanted inside him. The explosion should have been triggered when he said the word "antiquing" (something he would never say in theory).
Bender frequently behaves outside the norm for robots: he steals, drinks, and lies. While this behavior is programmed into his character, it often puts him in situations where he makes a mess of things for himself. In today's context, this is reminiscent of the challenges involved in creating AI with personality and emotion.
The Intellectual and the Hooligan
This compilation can't do without the much-loved robots from Star Wars: R2-D2 and C-3PO. We can describe them as a "hooligan" and an "intellectual." They usually work in tandem.
R2-D2 is an astromech droid designed to repair spaceships and interact with computers.
C-3PO is an interpreter droid designed to enable communication between different civilisations. He's fluent in over six million forms of communication.
These legendary bots suffer from bugs, too. R2-D2 sometimes shows excessive initiative and autonomy, making decisions on his own. For example, he often deviates from given instructions and acts on his own assessment of the situation. This is similar to the "black box" problem in modern AI systems, where an algorithm makes decisions but doesn't always explain why it did one thing or another.
Another "bug" is his inability to fully interact with others, as his communication system is limited to audio cues that not everyone understands.
C-3PO often follows his protocol too closely, which makes him ineffective in critical situations. He can panic and be slow to make decisions, or he can be very talkative, which sometimes gets in the way of the mission. In real life, this is similar to the issue with rule-based systems, which are unable to adapt to changing conditions.
Greetings from the past
"Flight of the Navigator" is an American sci-fi adventure film about time travel.
The story revolves around an alien ship computer called "Max", a voice and control system that helps the protagonist, David, travel through time and space. However, this computer has a backup issue.
When a collision with a high-voltage power line causes the loss of star and route data, it turns out that Max has no back-up storage from which he could recover this information. This makes him dependent on David, as only his memory now holds this data. All in all, it's only by a stroke of luck that the data ended up in David's head. It was placed there simply to test whether people truly use only 10% of their brain power. Storing data in one place puts it at risk. If anything happened to David, the information would be lost forever.
Such an error would be a serious flaw in real AI systems and databases. Thus, don't forget to back up your data so you don't lose anything important.
The Legend
The most iconic robot of all time is the Terminator. This robot assassin is programmed to carry out a mission to destroy a specific target. He's equipped with both physical strength and the ability to learn on his own.
The Terminator's biggest "bug" is his inability to fully integrate into human society. Despite his high physical adaptability and ability to mimic human behavior, he still looks and acts unnaturally, which makes him vulnerable to detection.
The T-800 model has an unsupervised learning limitation that leaves him open to enemys' unforeseen tactical decisions.
Conclusion
It seems that robots like these will now exist not only in our favourite movies and TV shows. For example, Elon Musk, along with Tesla, recently introduced the Optimus robot. They say the robot is designed to help around the house and even can work as a car mechanic.
The PVS-Studio team doesn't create robots. However, if you build your own and need help programming it, we can probably assist you in making it bug-free. Just download the trial version of the analyzer by following this link.
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