Robot Rat

In Seattle last week Dr. Stevenson Smith, University of Washington psychology professor, delighted colleagues and students by showing them a complicated "mechanical rat" which he and a helper had worked five years to perfect. Living rats, especially white ones, are favorites with animal psychologists who teach them to traverse complex mazes bristling with blind alleys, studying the effect on maze-learning of food, light, electric shock, drugs, blasts of air.

The Stevenson rat is impervious to all such lures and hindrances. Resembling a three-wheeled roller skate loaded with small motors, electromagnets and switches, the robot is set on a track containing twelve forks at each of which a wrong turn leads to a dead-end. The robot is first set to take the turn to the right at every fork. When this proves to be wrong and results in a bump against the dead-end, the "rat" goes into reverse, backs up past the fork, goes forward again, taking the correct left turn. This resets the controls in such a way as to enable the "rat" on the second try to negotiate the maze from start to finish without a single error.

"This machine," said its inventor, "remembers what it has learned far better than any man or animal. No living organism can be depended upon to make no errors of this type after one trial."

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