Xenobots: World's First Ever Robots That Learned to Reproduce Itself

According to a peer-reviewed article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, researchers who constructed what they claim are the world's first living robots now declare that they can reproduce in an unprecedented fashion.

The researchers watched the xenobots, each made up of roughly 3,000 stem cells, moving around a petri dish, collecting stray stem cells and clumping them together. When enough stem cells were gathered, the clumps transformed into new xenobots. Bongard told CNN that while the behavior was unusual and situation-specific at the time, the team utilized the supercomputer to test billions of body forms to find the best shape for the collection, which ended up looking a lot like Pac-Man. The C-shaped xenobots were far more successful in catching clusters of stem cells and forming new xenobots, just like Pac-form Man's is great for gobbling ghosts.

"Most people think of robots as being constructed of metals and ceramics, but what matters is what a robot does, which is behave autonomously on behalf of people," Bongard told CNN. "... These machines were not programmed in the manner we normally think of writing code by the AI. It molded and fashioned itself into this Pac-Man form."