Scarecrows do a much better job scaring humans than they do scaring birds. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For most Americans, scarecrows are synonymous with autumn. They pop up in corn mazes and crop fields at harvest festivals, on hay bales in grocery store displays, and as set dressing or (increasingly) as villains in fall-flavored horror films . But for all their ubiquity, agricultural scientist Rebecca Brown reflects, "I don't think I've ever seen a commercial farm that used a scarecrow with the intent of scaring birds. If they've got one, it's as seasonal decoration."

I remember mentioning to Igor Aleksander -- one of the great AI pioneers and thinkers -- while I was interviewing him for Philosophy Now magazine, that for many people, AI was going to be an unexpected, shrink-wrapped, 2-for-1 deal. What was the unexpected item in the bagging area? Well, if you recognise the phrase in italics, you are probably an experienced user of supermarket self-service checkouts (probably British; feel free to provide the equivalents in French, German, etc.), where the machines seem rather too easily surprised. The extreme short-sightedness that prevents them seeing what is to us entirely foreseeable, and their inflexibility in general, leads almost inevitably to a rather one-sided dialogue concerning the shortcomings of the machine, the designer, the manufacturer, and the store operator, that can be neatly encapsulated in the simple phrase, "Stupid bloody machines!" Alas, Artificial Stupidity is as inevitable as natural stupidity, but we take natural stupidity largely for granted because we know we are all fallible. It's the perfectly ordinary consequence of having soft, squishy brains with a limited capacity for understanding anything, let alone a world we can only dimly perceive.

The first Robotics Exhibition and Competition sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence was held in San Jose, California, on 14-16 July 1992 in conjunction with the Tenth National Conference on AI. This article describes the history behind the competition, the preparations leading to the competition, the threedays during which 12 teams competed in the three events making up the competition, and the prospects for other such competitions in the future. Advanced sensors and efficient actuators and power systems are now available for a wide range of applications. Related technology in vision, planning, and learning has also matured, and the time is ripe for a marriage of these technologies. Further, the growing economic incentives for robotic systems point the way to challenging research.

The first Robotics Exhibition and Competition sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was held in San Jose, California, on 14-16 July 1992 in conjunction with the Tenth National Conference on AI. This article describes the history behind the competition, the preparations leading to the competition, the threedays during which 12 teams competed in the three events making up the competition, and the prospects for other such competitions in the future.