Cog Tale: The extraordinary resilience of an intelligent robot.

There was this beautiful and very intelligent artificial creature 
named Cog which liked to walk around at MIT, converse with wise 
professors and charm young students. Rodney Brooks did not like that 
and decided to prevent Cog from navigating. So, he removed Cog's legs. 
But then Cog started using his arms to hump around. So Brooks removed 
one arm. Cog was now unable to navigate and spent long days in a corner 
of the lab. One night Brooks entered the lab and Cog adressed him: 
"Can you hug me please"? Brooks was very impressed to see his robot 
show emotion and huged the robot. But then the robot added 
"Now, can you carry me to the other side of the lab please?". 
Brooks became very angry. He decided to made Cog so ugly that no-one 
ever would want to hug him. He attached a right hand to the left arm 
and made that arm big with protruding motors. To make sure that Cog 
would not come up with any new tricks, he only left a primitive vision 
system, 2 cameras and some servo motors, and left students in charge of 
its development. 

G. Bugmann, Monte Verita, September 1995