If Algirdas Budrys–who signed his work "Algis Budrys" and answered to "Ajay" among the regular Americans with whom he lived–maintained an apprehensive watchfulness toward much of the human race, it wasn't without justification. To start with, as the small son of Lithuania's consul general in Königsberg, East Prussia, he had seen Adolf Hitler pass in full Nazi pomp, while the citizens of the city where Immanuel Kant lay buried whipped themselves into such frenzies of admiration that they soiled themselves and defecated in public. More than seven decades later, dying in a Chicago suburb, Budrys still remembered what he had seen from the second-story window of his parents' apartment on that spring day in 1936. He told me, "After the Hitlerjugend walked through, Hitler came by in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up. I'm sure he had an iron bar up his sleeve, because he couldn't have kept his arm that particular way for so long otherwise."

Drawing heavily on the chemistry of biology, researchers from Humboldt University in Germany have devised a way for electronic agents to efficiently assemble a network without relying on a central plan. The researchers modeled their idea on the methods of insects and other life forms whose communications lack central planning, but who manage to form networks when individuals secrete and respond to chemical trails. The researchers found that what works for ants and bacteria also works for autonomous pieces of computer code. "The idea is inspired by chemotactic models of tracking trail formation widely found in insects, bacteria, [and] slime molds," said Frank Schweitzer, an associate professor at Humboldt University and a research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligence Systems in Germany. The work could eventually be used for self-assembling circuits, groups of coordinated robots and adaptive cancer treatments, according to Schweitzer.

You've likely heard stories about the birth of the PC: of Xerox PARC as the Mecca of computing; of its creation of the Alto, Ethernet, and the laser printer; of the Homebrew Computer Club, the MITS Altair, Bill Gates and the theft of his Micro-soft Basic; of Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founding of Apple, and the Jobs visit to PARC that inspired the Macintosh. But what you may not know about is the really early history. The stories of Doug Engelbart and John McCarthy, of the Augmentation Research Center, and of the early days of the Stanford University AI Lab (SAIL) are not well known. Yes, you may have heard that Engelbart invented the mouse, and that SAIL and Stanford led to companies like Sun and Cisco. But there are better stories, great and old ones from the early days of computing, about the events that led to personal computing as we know it. In his wonderful new book, What the Dormouse Said…, John Markoff tells these stories.

Manufacturing, finance, and the communications industry have in the last decade all come to rely upon artificial intelligence. But there's one industry that continues to put up resistance: the legal profession. The idea of a machine making legal decisions was long considered by opponents to be dangerous and ethically untenable. That's about to change, says John Zeleznikow, a computer scientist at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Zeleznikow believes AI is about to improve people's access to justice and massively reduce the costs of running legal services.

On a crisp october day last year, Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute kicked off its 25th-anniversary celebration, as the world's robotics experts came to Pittsburgh to see C-3PO, Shakey the robot, Honda's Asimo, and Astro Boy inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame. The next day saw demonstrations of running, snaking, and bagpipe-playing bots. On the third day, it was Mitsuo Kawato's turn to speak. The lights went down, and the director of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, made his way to the stage to the beat of rock music. Despite such a welcome, Kawato is an outsider here, dismissive of the self-congratulation that creeps into conversations about modern robotics.

A new kind of visual-search engine has been developed to automatically scour sports footage for clips showing specific types of action and events. According to its creators, borrowing a few tricks from the field of machine translation seems to make all the difference in improving the accuracy of video search. Despite recent advances in visual-search engines, accurate video search still remains a challenge, particularly when dealing with sports footage, says Michael Fleischman, a computer scientist at MIT. "The difference between a home run and a foul ball is often hard for a human novice to notice, and nearly impossible for a machine to recognize." To cope with growing video repositories, cutting-edge systems are now emerging that use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to try to improve the search accuracy by generating text transcripts. The trouble is, search terms are often repeated out of context, says Fleischman.

Scientists in Denmark are developing an agricultural robot for identifying and eliminating weeds. While this might seem like a relatively easy task, it actually requires a lot of machine intelligence to pick out the weeds among the crops. The robot is still in the early stages of development, but the researchers hope that it will ultimately lead to a reduction in the amount of herbicides used by farmers and therefore cut costs. Called Hortibot, the semi-autonomous robot is a navigational platform designed to have different agricultural tools fitted to it to either mechanically remove weeds or precision-spray them with herbicide. "The original purpose was to build a robot that was simple to use and could be operated by an unskilled worker," says Rasmus Jørgensen, an agricultural scientist at the Institute of Agricultural Engineering at Aarhus University, in Horsens, Denmark.

Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe that by introducing emotional variables to the decision-making process, they should be able to create more-natural human and computer interactions. "We don't really believe that computers can have emotions, but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical reasoning," says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. By bestowing intelligent agents with similar emotions, researchers hope that robots can then emulate this humanlike reasoning, he says. The hardware for the robot, called iCAT, was developed by the Dutch research firm Philips and designed to be a generic companion robotic platform. By enabling the robot to form facial expressions using its eyebrows, eyelids, mouth, and head position, the researchers are aiming to let it show if it is confused, for example, when interacting with its human user.

This article appears in the March/April 2007 issue of Technology Review. Last year, Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, stood on a beach in southern France, watching the sun set, studying a document he'd printed earlier that afternoon. A March rain had begun to fall, and the ink was beginning to smear. Five years before, he'd agreed to lead a diverse group of researchers working on a project called the Semantic Web, which seeks to give computers the ability–the seeming intelligence–to understand content on the World Wide Web. At the time, he'd made a list of goals, a copy of which he now held in his hand. If he'd achieved those goals, his part of the job was done. Taking stock on the beach, he crossed off items one by one. The Semantic Web initiative's basic standards were in place; big companies were involved; startups were merging or being purchased; analysts and national and international newspapers, not just technical publications, were writing about the project. Only a single item remained: taking the technology mainstream.

While there are hundreds of incredible robots to choose from throughout the ages, here is a list of just a few of the most significant or memorable robots throughout history, arranged in chronological order. That's right--the first robot is really that old. Archytas, the Greek philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and statesman, may very well have laid down the principle of mathematical mechanics. One of his many projects was a wooden mechanical bird, dubbed The Pigeon, which was propelled by steam and could apparently fly for up to 200 meters. This feat might not only be the first robot ever created, but also one of the first flying contraptions.