Scientists built an AI robot that's figuring life out just like humans do

There are so many precious moments in a newborn's life that parents love to capture on film: The first time their child sits up on her own, the first time she stands, her first cautious steps. Igor Mordatch, a robotics post-doctorate student at the University of California, Berkeley, has been doing similarly for a humanoid robot, called Darwin, which he programed to learn just like a human child might. Mordatch and his team at Berkeley's Robotics lab started out by working for two years on a computer system that simulates how a robot might act in certain situations. The system is a group of neural networks--computer algorithms modeled after the structure of a human brain. In the last few months, his team has been transferring that system over into Darwin itself.