Childhood facinations rediscovered

Some particular images from childhood have stayed on my mind ever since. Here is a little list of them:

Strandbeesten
Strandbeesten (beach animals), which are mechanical constructions made of PVC tubes and PET bottles which can propagate over a beach only using the force of the wind. The creator applies an evolutionary approach in creating new machines, favouring properties that make the current machines succesfull in successive generations.

I saw recordings of these creatures on television, on a children's news show.

Cooperating LEGO-robots
In the late 1990's, in the AI-lab of Luc Steels at the Vrije Univeriteit Brussel, a project ran using autonomous mobile LEGO-robots in an artificial but physical environment. The goals of the project was to study the evolution of meaning in such a simplified environment. See for example the paper "Perceptiual grounding in robots" by Paul Vogt 1998

I was about 10 years old back then, building machines using LEGO by myself, although my machines were not endowed with the sofisticated kind of controllers that the Belgian robots were. Seeing these robots drive around stimulated my interest in programming, which led me to pursue a Bachelor's degree in computer science about 10 years later.