When Steve Grand developed his artificial-life computer game Creatures nine years ago, he never dreamed that 1 million people would play it and come to care deeply about the lives of their virtual pets. Creatures allowed players to design these pets, or norns, and observe how they interacted with their environment and with other norns. The norns have computer-simulated hormones and DNA. According to Grand's book "Creation: Life and How to Make it," "Creatures was probably the closest thing there has been to a new form of life on this planet in four billion years." That's a pretty startling claim, but as Grand explains in his strangely accessible and consistently surprising book, whether or not you believe it depends on your definition of what's alive. Grand -- now two years into building a 4-month-old robot orangutan named Lucy -- argues that our traditional notion of life is just now beginning to change. Grand spoke to Salon from his home outside of Bristol, England (where he works out of his garage), about what artificial life says about the soul, why emotions are so important to intelligence and why someday we might drive cars that enjoy doing their work. I was a college dropout but I trained to be a primary school teacher. I was really lazy at it and hated standing up in front of people and speaking. But the reason I got into teaching was not really because I was interested in teaching but because I was interested in children's minds and how people grow and develop. Yes, this was the '70s when I was at college.

There are several seemingly reasonable problems that are exciting and challenging, and yet are currently unsolvable. Solutions to these problems will require major new insights and fundamental advances in computer science and artificial intelligence. Such problems include: World Champion Chess machine, Translating Telephone, Discovery of a major mathematical result by a computer, and so on. Here I will present two such grand challenges which if successful can be expected have major impact on society: Self-Organizing Systems that learn from examples and observations and Self-Replicating Systems that can make copies of themselves.

Welcome to Psychology at CMU. With nearly 30 award-winning faculty and almost 150 people in total, we are a vibrant community whose research continues our Department's 100 year tradition of studying the deeper mechanisms and processes underlying human behavior and its neural bases. Innovation is in our DNA: our department has been at the center of helping create new scientific initiatives in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, neural-nets, and, more recently, university-wide efforts in brain research and the science of education. We are mindful that research should have real-world impact. We have helped to create several successful companies, to build science-based cognitive tutors, to develop the emerging field of health neuroscience, and to better understand how distraction in the classroom affects learning.

The delights of computer programming can be a tough sell to many students -- particularly girls. "If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say'Do you want to learn how to program a computer?', "But if you walk in and say'Do you want to learn how to tell a story and make a movie?', all the hands go up." That's one reason why Dr. Pausch is so excited about a groundbreaking deal announced earlier this month in which video game giant Electronic Arts has agreed to donate the animation for characters from "The Sims" to Carnegie Mellon for use in a novice programmers' course the school has developed. Electronic Arts, Inc., headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., has sold 58 million copies of "The Sims," making it the best-selling video game of all time. Players can choose characters, build and furnish houses for them, and take care of them as they interact with each other. Carnegie Mellon will use the Sims characters in its "Alice" course, which is designed to make basic programming more palatable to students by allowing them to move animated figures around on the computer screen rather than writing abstruse lines of code. Alice, first developed a decade ago, already has its own set of animated characters, which Dr. Pausch described as "the best we could make with our own two hands.

At Carnegie Mellon University, one robotics student estimates that there are more robots than students in the department, but in a shameful display of mammalian arrogance, the precise number and type of said robots is unknown. That realization led the student, Heather Knight, to begin the world's first robot census. Knight, a graduate student in robotics (Carnegie Mellon is the only school in the country to offer a degree program in robotics), began by counting the 547 robots present on the CMU campus, not including its government-run satellite lab in which several hundred secret robots are estimated to be languishing. But that was only the beginning. The quest to document robots spread from Carnegie Mellon to the Makers, a community of DIY enthusiasts organized loosely by MAKE Magazine and its accompanying Maker's Faire events. Knight put out word on the census through the Makers, and set up her own online census, which, it should be noted, is far more in-depth than the U.S. government's census.

The hexapod robot in the foreground was constructed by Larry Watkins and Todd Heinze. In the background, a robot constructed by Ben Greer ambles along. The challenge of the Autonomous Vehicle Competition, hosted by hobbyist electronics vendor SparkFun at its Boulder, Colorado, headquarters, seems simple enough: Build a robot that can navigate itself around the company's parking lot. Though the AVC course is dotted with small obstacles, it's really just one lap -- a distance of less than 900 feet. But for the majority of competitors, it feels more like the path into Mordor.

Now I want you to meet somebody who is...well, he is what he is. And what he is, is--and you'll see this in the way he plays, the way he works, the way he loves, even the way he does his laundry--the man is an engineer, and such an engineer that if you were to look deep into his cells, down to the DNA where the rest of us have AAs and CCs and TTs and GGs he has, I haven't seen this, but I'm sure it's true, he has E-N-G-I-N-E-E-R. JAMES MCLURKIN: All right, let's, let's get this going. ROBERT KRULWICH: James McLurkin does not waste time. DARA BOURNE (James McLurkin's Girlfriend): James said to me, when we went out to dinner the first time, "I'm a geek."

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the "send" button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade. EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks. The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growing conflict over the role of automation in education.

People are good at understanding one another's emotions. We realize quickly that now is not a good time to approach the boss or that a loved one is having a lousy day. These skills are so essential that those without them are considered disabled. Yet until recently, our machines could not identify even seemingly simple emotions, like anger or frustration. The GPS device chirps happily even when the driver is ready to hurl it out the window.