Robot drags a 50kg rice bag needlessly — how do we measure robot "stupidity"?

ducha_aiki · x · 2026-09-12

Researcher duchaaiki poses a thought experiment: a robot moves a hook from A to B with battery drain measured (assuming perfect operation). When the hook catches a 50kg bag of rice, a "stupid" robot keeps pulling hook and bag, while a clever one untangles it and proceeds without the load.

The open question: is there a metric or formula that accounts for this kind of "stupidity" — wasted effort beyond task success? It's really a question about quantifying strategy-level inefficiency in robot policies, not just task completion.

Related event: EPFL research proposes measuring robot 'foolishness' via regret minimization(2 posts)→

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