Robotic helicopteres

Robotic helicopteres taught themselves

Robotic helicopters are pictured prior to an airshow on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, September 15, 2008.

The airshow, which involves helicopters that have taught themselves to fly by watching other helicopters, is a demonstration of an "apprenticeship learning algorithm" developed by computer science professor Andrew Ng and other students at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, where robots learn by observing an expert, rather than by having software engineers attempt to write instructions from scratch.

REUTERS/Robert Galbraith (UNITED STATES)