Pogoing Punk robots

Punk band Neurotic and the PVCs sound great tonight. The crowd are clapping and cheering and at the front three robots are jumping up and down, doing the punk pogo dance. Since Neurotic came on the robots can hardly keep still. They are the perfect band for these three robots. Their frontman, Fiddian, made them learn to like the same music he does.

Programming punks

How do you program a punk? The robots' programmers creted a network of computerised connections like the ones in a real brain - a 'neural network'. Then they let the robots listen to different kinds of music and told them what it was, like reggae, pop, and of course, Fiddian's collection of classic punk. The more they listened, the stronger the connections in the neural network become and the easier it was for them to recognise the music thye were listening to.

The last step was to tell the robots to go out and enjoy some punk. The programmers turned off the robots' neural connections to other kinds of music, so Beyonce or Bob Marley would no longer satisfy them. They would only dance to the angry, churning sound of punk guitars. The robots got dressed up in spray-painted leather, studded belts and safety pins, so they looked like extra-tough boxing gloves on sticks. Then the three two-metre tall troublemakers went to their first gig.

The robots' first gig

Whenever a band begins to play, the robot's computer brain looks at the patterns in the music. If it matches the idea of punk music they've learned, the robots dance, firing a cylinder of compressed air to make them jump up and down. If the pattern isn't quite right, they stand still. For lots of songs they hardly dance at all. It's the 'wrong' kind of punk music. It's too different to Fiddian's favourites. They've developed taste, and it's the same as Fiddian's.

As the robots jump wildly up and down, it's clear that Neurotic and the PVCs now have three tall, tough, robot superfans.