The humble game of Jenga has become the latest human pursuit to fall to machines, scientists have announced. In what marks significant progress for robotic manipulation of real-world objects, a Jenga-playing machine can learn the complex physics involved in withdrawing wooden blocks from a tower through physical trial and error. This differentiates it from robots that have mastered purely cognitive games such as chess and Go through visual cues. "Playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing and aligning pieces," said Prof Alberto Rodriguez from the department of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Combining interactive perception and manipulation – whereby the robot would touch the tower to learn how and when to move blocks – is extremely difficult to simulate and therefore the robot has to learn in the real world, he added.