Robot
Walter stressed the importance of using purely analogue electronics to simulate brain processes at a time when his contemporaries such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann were all turning towards a view of mental processes in terms of digital computation. His work inspired subsequent generations of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec and Mark Tilden. Modern incarnations of Walter's "turtles" may be found in the form of BEAM robotics.
The first digitally operated and programmable robot was invented by George Devol in 1954 and was ultimately called the Unimate. This ultimately laid the foundations of the modern robotics industry. Devol sold the first Unimate to General Motors in 1960, and it was installed in 1961 in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them. Devol's patent for the first digitally operated programmable robotic arm represents the foundation of the modern robotics industry.
Liar! (short story)
"Liar!" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the May 1941 issue of "Astounding Science Fiction" and was reprinted in the collections "I, Robot" (1950) and "The Complete Robot" (1982). It was Asimov's third published positronic robot story. Although the word "robot" was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his 1920 play "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots), Asimov's story "Liar!" contains the first recorded use of the word "robotics" according to the "Oxford English Dictionary". The events of this short story are also mentioned in the novel "The Robots of Dawn" written by the same author.