While the world's great artists have all been humans so far, robots may soon give the old masters a run for their money. Participants in the first annual Robot Art competition showed just how far our silicon counterparts have come in creating great artwork. The robots took a variety of approaches, with some coming up with their own compositions, or challenging themselves to work with a limited palette. "The results of this competition show a significant step in the advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence to create beauty. In addition to being geographically diverse, the approach to creating art that these robots took varied significantly, sometimes in unexpected exciting ways. Some robots concentrated on mastering traditional painting techniques, others experimented with artificial creativity, while others explored the nature of human/robot collaboration. I am excited to see how new teams take in this year's results, and try to top them in next year's competition," RobotArt.org

In an art contest where robots are the artists, the future of art and artificially-intelligent computational creativity is on display. Fourteen teams from seven countries contributed 71 entries to the first RobotArt Competition. Started by artist and mechanical engineer Andrew Conru, the event aims to highlight the technical side of art creation and promote AI, image processing, and robotics. There are two different categories for robot artists: Fully automated and manually generated. Automated artwork means the entire process is done by a robot, running autonomously without input from the human creators.