Hired Girl

This trilobite prowls around in a room and is supposed to eat up dust and dirt on floors. A gift from my sister, the secondhand gismo is so stupid that she seems to have decided to throw it away in our new house. However, as it turns out, it is at least an amusing toy for me and my son. As we observed, it moves in several modes. It moves along the walls of a room while searching for the wall at the same time. It moves straight until it hits the wall. It moves in a circular pattern... The problem is it doesn't seem to know what the shape of the room it is cleaning is like. It just randomly repeats patterns of motion and only with good luck he happens to pass over a dirty place and happens to sweep the dust. The lack of spacial recognition is mainly the cause of stupidity. But it's cute all the more for it.
By the way, this reminds me of a classic SF novel titled "The door into Summer" where a cat-loving main character develops "Hired Girl", an automatic cleaning machine, to save housewives from never-ending labor of household chores. Although it was written more than 50 years ago, the robot was a really plausible one. It doesn't do so much. It just picks up things, vacuums, or polishes. But there are some points in it superior to my sister's gift. It goes out of a room if it finds people in the room so as not to disturb them. It can search for dirty floors. These two functions look easy but actually hard to be added to any of today's robot cleaners. First the robot must recognize the concept of "room", which is more ambiguous than you might think. Usually rooms have four walls with some doors but some may have one wall with a big opening. A robot may get confused about where the room ended. Even a piece of furniture placed in a room is enough to confuse them about the area of the room. Secondly, it must know what "dirty" is. Being dirty or not is quite subjective concept, which is hard to be quantified.
These are good examples of how hard it is to teach a machine what we usually take for granted. As long as we are born homo-sapience, we have something in common, which means we don't have to take trouble to define all the things around us. We have almost a similar idea about what "a dirty" floor is like. But a machine doesn't.
We must go a long, long way before we can give a human-like intelligence to a robot cleaner. Until then we can at least play with the moronic machine, sometimes thinking about how incredibly more sophisticated the robot created by God is than the one created by that robot.