MIT's Cheetah learns to run by itself. Nobody programes it with how to deal with difficult terrain, nobody has to pick it up when it falls over, understand why it fell and change the code.
No - it does itself. But you would expect that. The freeky bit is it doesn't have to fall over, it can fall over in a similation, learn from that and then carry on running.
So it can do 100 days worth of running around and falling over in a 3 hour simulation!
Imagine being able to do that in the human world - 100 days of studying for an exam by plugging in for 3 hours. Practicing for the slopes in the winter Olympics would be a breeze - makes the visualistion techniques used look like the stone age.
It has been proposed, but to my knowledge only ever achived in the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson production of "Joe 90" in the late 1960's- where they could upload the skill sets of people like pilots and nuclear technicians to a small child with the aim of winning the cold war.
OK - it was a puppet, but the idea was there....
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