In January, Max Versace and Heather Ames were busy with two newborns: their son Gabriel and Animat, a virtual rat.

Like all babies, when Gabriel was born his brain allowed him to do only simple things like grasp, suck and see blurry images of his parents. The rest was up to him. From the first day his body experienced the world, his senses began to respond. He learned to follow a moving object with his eyes, tell red from yellow, and reach for his mother. Over the next couple of years, he will learn to crawl, walk, talk and, eventually, look after himself.

With any luck, Animat’s development will follow a similar path. It didn’t start with much programming, either. But Animat’s interaction with its virtual world has already taught it how to tell colours apart and understand the space around it. As it develops, it will use its senses to learn even more.

Animat’s “parents”, researchers at Boston University, are trying to build intelligent machines based on the smartest machine we know of: the brain. But instead of focusing on programming the brain itself, they are taking a cue from biology. Like every human baby, and unlike the vast majority of engineered intelligence, the development of Animat’s intelligence will depend on the way its body senses the world. They hope this approach will advance machine intelligence to the point that robots start to think in a more human way.

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New Scientist, August 2011.