"Ouch!

By J. Madeleine Nash/Boston

With a wave of skeletal hands and a blink of metallic eyelids, an engaging humanoid named Jorel plays the role of high-tech tout to the hilt. But while a human huckster would vary his spiel, Jorel repeats the same phrases over and over. "Humans," Jorel announces with a flourish, "you are witnessing the beginning of a great new era." Watching the performance, Graphic Designer Jill Sacherman is impressed by Jorel's "lovely" tapering fingers but finds his clicking teeth off-putting. "It's just a little bit creepy," she says.

Jorel is the first display encountered by visitors to "Robots and Beyond," an exhibition of intelligent machines that opened at the Boston Museum of Science last week. Assembled at a cost of $4 million (half of it from the Massachusettsbased Digital Equipment Corp.), the exhibit over the next three years will travel to seven other U.S. cities. In two large rooms of the museum's west wing, more than three dozen imaginative displays create the atmosphere of a futuristic carnival. Visitors can play a game of three-card monte with a computer cardsharp or use a keyboard to control toy robots in a factory made of Lego blocks. They can watch industrial arms tirelessly stack silicon wafers or pour chemicals from one test tube into another. And if they wait patiently, they may even hear a small wheeled robot exclaim "Ouch!" and "Woe is me!" whenever it bumps into a wall.

Among the more popular displays:

ROBOTIC SKIN. A glowing circle of red light embedded in the chest of a clear plastic manikin marks the location of a patch of artificial "skin." The colorless and transparent skin consists of piezoelectric film, which transforms physical pressure into electrical impulses. When visitors touch the manikin's chest, electrical signals activate a computer voice system programmed to interpret different types of touch. Gentle pressure may elicit a languid "Oooh, I can feel that." But a rapid-fire tap prompts, "Hey! Cut it out! What are you, a woodpecker?" The skin is already being used experimentally to provide robot hands with a tactile sense.

THE ARTIST'S ASSISTANT. Behind another display hangs a colorful mural that suggests Cezanne -- or is it Gauguin? While a human artist, Harold Cohen, applied the acrylic paint, a computer program named Aaron "created" the underlying drawing by directing the movements of a pen held by a mechanical gripper across a blank sheet of paper. "It's hard for most people to understand that it's really doing what it's doing," says Cohen, a professor of visual arts at the University of California at San Diego who started work on Aaron's program 13 years ago and has steadily given it greater sophistication. In Boston, Aaron churns out pictures of people standing amid fantastic tropical forests. Aaron, explains Cohen, "knows" how knees and elbows look, how humans are constructed and how to draw stylized versions of their bodies.

COMPUTER VISION. Equipped with camera "eyes," computers can see, but not nearly as well as a person. To demonstrate the point, "Robots and Beyond" invites visitors to walk in front of two cameras. The computer hooked up to one camera has been programmed to notice only moving objects; a second computer notices only objects that remain still. The results are displayed on twin video screens: a waving hand appears in one image as a few lines of sparkling static; in the other it is invisible. Even more sophisticated is a nearby display that has adapted an industrial vision system to scan ordinary objects like combs, keys and coins. As long as the objects are correctly positioned beneath the camera, the computer easily identifies them. "I see a comb. Am I right?" it asks coyly.

EXPERT SYSTEMS. By playing a computer game of tic-tac-toe, visitors can get a rough idea of the workings of an expert system -- that is, a computer program that emulates the reasoning and procedures of an expert in a specialized field. The tic-tac-toe program relies on the judgment of seven internal "experts" in playing the game. For instance, WIN looks only for winning moves. DEFEND acts to block wins by its opponent, and DECIDE weighs the recommendations of the other six and dictates the moves. On the computer screen each of the experts has its own tic-tac-toe board. Their recommended moves are color-coded. Red denotes urgency: when the machine's opponent is one square away from victory, visitors can watch as DEFEND alerts DECIDE by coloring the critical square red.

On opening night "Robots and Beyond" experienced a few glitches. But what computer show would be complete without glitches? Observes Bob Carlson, a traffic manager at Gould Electronics: "Computers are a lot better than they used to be, and I think they'll get better than people in some respects. But they won't replace us." Jorel agrees. "No robot can tie a pair of shoelaces or understand as much language as a three-year-old child," he intones. "You humans are marvelous!"