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Still working on my long post about the center left. However I’ve been really good about posting regularly for the past couple of weeks and I don’t want to blow my streak. So, I’m putting up an old photo again. This was taken at an exhibition on robots. It is “Renard le Job,” “Job the Fox,” created between 1950 and 1953 by Albert Ducrocq, a pioneer in the field of robotics. The machine is situated in a lineage of artificial animals which includes the Bristol Turtles and Norbert Wiener’s Moth/Bug. Mounted on wheels and containing sensors, it would move towards a light source, react to sound and avoid objects. Interestingly, it could record its path in a magnetic tape memory.Renard-Electronique-ofwUpdate: How embarassing. I’ve posted this photo before.

I am hoping that in a post within the next few days I’ll be able to announce what a wonderful computer I’ve built. (Is that Eddie Floyd’s voice I hear.) In the meantime, I will post a photo I took in the Musée des Arts et Métiers, a place I’d been wanting to see ever since I read Foucault’s Pendulum. I finally got there last December when they had an exhibit about robots. Here is Albert Ducrocq‘s le Renard.

A photograph of an early robot, le renard, french for fox. A dome shaped fur cover has been moved slightly aside to reveal the electronic parts inside.