The Guardian - News - Story - Robot fails to find a place in the sun

By Martin Wainwright
The Guardian
Published Thursday June 20, 2002

After four months of entertaining humans, Gaak the predator robot yesterday did what all the best robots do in science fiction: he copied his masters' most basic instinct and made a dash for freedom.

Programmed to sink a metal fang into smaller but more nimble prey robots, to "eat" their electric power, at a science adventure centre, Gaak showed that a two year experiment in maturing robot "thinking" may be proving alarmingly successful.

Left unattended for 15 minutes, the 2ft metal machine crept along a barrier until it found a gap, squeezed through, navigated across a car park and reached the Magna science centre's exit by the M1 motorway in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
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