Boring

We had the pleasure of babysitting a couple of youngsters at the weekend and in an attempt to provide them with some distraction from SpongeBob, X Factor, eating and generally knocking lumps out of each other, we took them to the fantastic ArtBots exhibition in the Science Gallery..

As you'd imagine, there was lots of cool stuff there to entertain/bore all the adults/children but I'm saying the highlights were: a little contraption that demonstrated how to transform light into sound using eggshells; a Jackson Pollock-inspired 'live painting' that splattered different colours on a canvas depending on the noise in the room - a high pitched squeal led to purple paint being tossed onto the artwork, a low murmur was orange, and so on; A hand held oval thing about the size of a teapot that tilted in your hands to tell you what direction you should walk in. You could instruct it from your laptop where you wanted to go and it would tilt you all the way there. That's what they said anyway. It's not like we could really test it.

But for sheer amusement and relatability (because, as interesting as most of the stuff was, some of it just didn't make practical sense to a lot of punters - or to this punter anyway) the best thing at ArtBots was a robot that could solve a Rubek's Cube in less than a half minute or so. You'd take the cube, mix it up as much as you want and hand it to the robot. The robot picked it up, looked at each side and then solved it. The longest it took was 31 seconds. The fastest was about 10.

We stood and watched it with the kids for about 5 minutes during which time it must have done the puzzle 4 or 5 times. At the end, we asked one of them what she thought of it. Her only comment? "I thought the cube was going to bigger".

Seriously, who'd have them?!