BBC News - Dancing robots reveal cultural cues
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Human life is threaded through with information, images and ideas that we pass around. Often though the mechanisms by which those briefly-shared obsessions travel can be hard to unravel. Now dancing robots are helping to reveal some of the basic means by which those traditions, behaviours and ideas move, and mutate, in both human and animal societies.
The dancing robots were performing in a laboratory at the University of the West of England (UWE) as part of a long-term project that brought engineers, philosophers and cultural theorists together to analyse what the machines revealed. “This was an extremely ambitious project,” said Dr Alan Winfield, Hewlett-Packard professor of Electronic Engineering at the UWE who co-ordinated the research.
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