Creating robots with multiple personalities may be one way to make them act more like us.
Despite their reputation as a psychological disorder, we all have multiple personalities. Controlled personality switching helps us juggle our daily roles – as workers, parents and spouses, for instance. In contrast, robots are usually programmed to respond to situations by following a single set of rules, which makes them inflexible. To trigger a personality switch in robots, quantum logic, with its limitless and apparently random outcomes, could do the trick.
Quantum logic is a new type of robotic control, so roboticists needed a task to test its performance. They took the unusual step of including a science fiction story in the process of designing their quantum programming challenge. A story about a robot bartender provided the model of how to test quantum-driven programs with multiple personalities.
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