While Pretensions was in Korea last week, she was treated to a display of Korean robotics at an exhibition. For those not in the know, the Koreans, like the Japanese, are spending a lot of money on developing various kinds of robots and computational intelligence techniques.

Renowned Korean University KAIST (the MIT of South Korea) was showing off their Einstein Hubo. P found it vaguely disturbing for some reason; maybe it's Einstein's disembodied head on that robotic frame. Anyway, it walks (kind of), smiles, talks (can say hello and "I am Albert Hubo" and waves at the audience. Apparently it can do Tai-chi, 'though P finds this too bizarre for words. P's colleague said that she had nightmares that night about Einstein running amok in Terminator style. Inventor Jun hopes that Einstein can lead the way to developing robotic servants for the home. Hmm...

P also had a close encounter with EveR-1, although they had communication problems despite sharing a common gender (perhaps it would have been different had the talk revolved around nail polish). Yes, EveR-1 is the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology's robotic femmebot. Thankfully, she is only capable of movement from the waist up, but is able to sit decorously and respond to your remarks (sometimes). P had visions of particular scenes in Austin Powers movies (afficionados will know which she is talking about).

ETRI's POMI (Penguin Robot for Multimodal Interaction) is a robot with emotions - it responds to your actions and speech with coloured lights on its "face" and apparently smells, emitting nice smells when pleased and not so nice ones when unhappy. It's meant to interact with children apparently, but I wonder what they would make of it. Anyway, it's supposed to be a step up from last year's robotic koala (though I think the Koala was more cuddly).

There was also a rather fiercely contested robotic soccer game, which had more falling players than the UEFA cup. All good fun - now where's the remote?