After four days of hard work, the Participants to the 7th International Symposium of Robotic Research relaxed with a refreshing hike in the woods and a visit to an ancient monastery with annexed brewery.

This short march made me think of a humouristic way to frame the pictures of the Symposium good-bye party. The following is my imaginary rendition of that event.

The Cyberaedis

My few readers will forgive this daring attempt of summarizing the long and strenuous quest undertaken by a group of Knights for the Ideal Solution of the Robotic Revolution (ISRR, for short), which would make all machines intelligent and all demos successful.

The History of Science tells us that Robotics was born just a few years ago, in dark laboratories of technical universities.

This is far from the truth.

The true birth of this Science was in fact on the sunny shores of a city called Troy, where the Xanthus river meets its death in the sea.

At that time, the war between the Achaian and the Trojan armies had been fought for a long time, and knights and soldiers were tired and eager for peace. The king of Ithaca proposed then to build a machine that would hide in its inside a group of warriors, and that would take them into the inaccessible Troy.

His engineering team devised a machine that looked like a horse. It would have walked from the shores to the City walls, and the Trojans would have worshiped it as a god.

It was a difficult project, since the technology was not quite there, and the first demo to the Achaian management failed.

We all know what followed, that the horse was built on wheels and that the war was over. But history does not tell us what happened to the engineering team after the project was cancelled.

They took the sea on a boat in search of virtue, knowledge and technologies that would fix their demo, the mythical ISRR the Delphic Oracle had told them about. They are still sailing the high seas, coming to shore only during fall, when the fog is dense and only few can see them.

This is the true account of their last sighting, on the German shores of the Alps.

Liber 7th: The Herrshing Castle

Finally the Ocean was over and the Knights saw the

promised land . The morning was foggy and the view not clear, but the ambiguous words of the Oracle were crisp: reach the shore where the

castle of all mechanisms is guarding the waters.

Off they went to the land, the castle

overlooking their shoulders. No turning back was in their mind, although they were sure of the dangers expecting them.

Monsters blocked their way. Knights fell and were

tortured . Four days lasted the battle, and finally the castle yielded to them. It was a time to celebrate.

Music and

dances filled the night, sure as they were that the quest for the mythical ISRR was over.

The battle was successful, but not enough technology was found. The Oracle did not say that this castle was the end of the quest. Disappointment overcome the knights.