Punk robots learn to pogo

It’s the second of three punk gigs in a row for Neurotic and the PVCs, and tonight they’re sounding good. The audience seem to be enjoying it too. All around the room the people are clapping and cheering, and in the middle of the mosh pit the three robots are dancing. They’re jumping up and down in the style of the classic punk pogo, and they’ve been doing it all night whenever they like the music most. Since Neurotic came on the robots can hardly keep still. In fact Neurotic and the PVCs might be the best, most perfect band for these three robots to listen to, since their frontman, Fiddian, made sure they learned to like the same music he does.

Programming punks

It’s a tough task to get a robot to learn what punk music sounds like, but there are lots of hints lurking in our own brains. Inside your brain are billions of connected cells called neurons that can send messages to one another. When and where the messages get sent depends on how strong each connection is, and we forge new connections whenever we learn something.

What the robots’ programmers did was to wire up a network of computerised connections like the ones in a real brain. Then they let the robots sample lots of different kinds of music and told them what it was, like reggae, pop, and of course, Fiddian’s collection of classic punk. That way the connections in the neural network got stronger and stronger – the more music the robots listened to, the easier it got for them to recognise what kind of stuff it was. When they recognised a style they’d been told to look out for, they would dance, firing a cylinder of compressed air to make them jump up and down.

The robots' first gig

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 no Kylie or Bob Marley would 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 with their bloblike bodies they looked like extra-tough boxing gloves on sticks. Then the three two-metre tall troublemakers went to their first gig.

Whenever a band begins to play, the robots’ computer system analyses the sound coming from the stage. If the patterns in it look the same as the idea of punk music they’ve learned, the robots begin to dance. If the pattern isn’t quite right, they stand still. For lots of songs they hardly dance at all, which might seem weird since all the bands that are playing the gig call themselves punk bands. Except there are many different styles of punk music, and the robots have been brought up listening to Fiddian’s favourites. The other styles aren’t close enough to the robots’ idea of punk – they’ve developed taste, and it’s the same as Fiddian’s. Which is why the robots go crazy for Neurotic and the PVCs. Fiddian’s songs are influenced by classic punk like the Clash, the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie & the Banshees, which is exactly the music he’s taught the robots to love. As the robots jump wildly up and down, it’s clear that Neurotic and the PVCs now have three tall, tough, computerised superfans.