Saint-Louis based AI company Imagination Engines Inc claims to have developed a robot able to learn and dream.

They have developed the “Neural Network Based Prototyping System and Method” wherein neural networks spontaneously connect themselves in a matter of seconds into the neural circuitry required for ambitious robotic brains.

The neural network architecture functions like a brain, and can form complete models of their worlds, consider alternative scenarios, and finally choose the alternative best suited to a problem.

To accelerate the learning and the bootstrap toward creative behaviours, IEI’s robots go to sleep and enter a virtual dream world wherein they experience myriad settings and situations against which they may pit their accumulating knowledge and creativity. When they awake, they may apply their dream state training to the real world, or use such experience to devise even more ambitious responses to newly arising environmental scenarios.

Via Clippings < Geekzone.
More details in the Press Release.