H&R Staff Writer

DECATUR - A robot rumbles through a darkened labyrinth as "Mission Impossible" theme music rises from the cavernous maze.

No, this isn't a scene from a far-fetched futuristic action movie.

It's part of a semester-end project in James Rauff's artificial intelligence class at Millikin University. Students have been busy lately building Lego robots and writing software to run the mechanical creations.

The robots' mission: Navigate a makeshift maze to find a hidden light source. When the robots discover the light, they play a victory tune such as the "Mission Impossible" theme song.

The project is a small-scale simulation of the search-and-rescue machines used to find people buried in earthquakes or rubble from a collapsed building, Rauff said. Students learn engineering, design, programming and teamwork with the project.

Andy Bruder, a senior from Mount Zion, and Mike Schwarz, a senior from Clinton, constructed a robot with tank-like treads to navigate the maze.

Students were pleased with their creations. But they don't have to fear their old-fashioned human brain-power will become obsolete anytime soon. It was human intelligence, after all, that spawned artificial intelligence.

"A computer is superior in some aspects because it has no emotion," Bruder said. "It doesn't think with the heart like humans do. It will do the same thing. But it's only going to be as smart as you can program it."

Robots seem to "think" differently than humans. When humans come to a fork in the road, they might look both ways or rely on a gut feeling which way to go. The cool logic of a robot's program randomly picks a direction to try.

Students also wrote computer programs this semester that simulate the operation of a human brain. Another program they created plays tic-tac-toe.

But duels between two computer programs resulted in consistent stalemates because programs would "think out" all possible moves and avoid any play that would result in a loss.

Computers can give world-class chess players a tough game, but humans still emerge triumphant in Go, an East Asian board game.

"Computers are very fast and they have big memories," Rauff said. "But what they still can't do as well as humans is play hunches and see big patterns overall."

Mike Frazier can be reached at mfrazier@; herald-review.com or 421-7985.