Easily the coolest thing I've seen all gorram DAY!!

Those weren't shrieks of terror. Were you EVER a kid? Breaking toys is OK as long as it is really, really cool. If you watch, some of the kids are pressing up against the glass to get a better look.

Theres something strangely disturbing about this.

The shrieks were from the next door arena where a similar battle-bot was going at it with a group of preschoolers.

and that jimmy, is why there are no longer dinosaurs on earth.

I can't even watch that.
it's too sad and i'm not kidding.
at least give pleo a freaking laser on his head or something.

I'm gonna watchit AGAIN!!

That reminds me of pictures of "Barney the purple dinosaur" that me and my friends would draw when we were about 8. He'd usually be decapitated and bleeding, with helicopters, jet fighters and army men with machine guns shooting him.

Yes, I was a disturbing child.

who else thinks that the dinosaur flies a little too far when it is hit by the other robot. It just doesn't quite seem right

look at 1:57

That took a lot longer than I thought it would...

@ianmanning: Nah, you have to take account of the spinning blades hitting home. Lots of kinetic energy when they get a good hit.

For whatever reason, that Pleo thing looks so live (and, yes...cute) looking that it's almost sad to watch...

The fact that Pleo was autonomous & the battle bot had a human operator may have been a factor.

@heroineworshipper: seriously?

proves that geeks can be bad parents too...

Is that the robotic version of a snuff film?

Not that anybody cares....but IM BACK!!!!
hoorah!!!!
well I agree with some of the commenters, the poor PLEO is jus looking around when all of a sudden it flies to one side. My mom also thought that it was some sort of a real animal.
POOR PLEO.

I heard some kids crying, for good reason too. Why'd you have go and kill the little dinosaur!

This is interesting! At what point will robots become sufficient aware that kind of thing would be the moral equivalent to putting a battle bot up against a mouse, or a chicken?

@Josh_Geyer: No most kids did that. I did it with many stupid characters from tv.

First of all, WTF is a Pleo? Second, it was hilarious with the first couple hits, but then it just got tedious. Like it was some sort of Sisyphean chore to chase down the battered remains, only to send it flying across the arena once again.

@--Tito--:
I was once challenged to see if, within the course of a single school year, I could come up with 100 unique ways to kill Smurfs by drawing them on my friend's dry-erase message board in college. He insisted on using a Smurf-blue marker, which just demanded the occassional hammer-splatted Smurf be left for him.

It lasted for a surprisingly long time nearly intact for something put up against a weapon designed to shred armored bots...

My favorite bit was when it got skinned at the end. :-p

Reminds me of the scene from A.I. where the robots are rounded up and killed for entertainment.

+ Watch video

Is it fun because it looks like a cute little dinosaur that is helpless? Are Pleos designed to get kids to emotionally connect with them? Is it fun because it's like getting the kid's favorite teddy bear to be mowed down together with the kid's feelings? Are there kids screaming with joy? Should there be a rating like PG-11 or something?

PETA will find a way to complain about this.

justice is served once more....

Wow, knowing the pleo is touch sensitive, and has AI, and looks like a pet, this made me UPSET. I would have defended pleo best I could.

Asshole robot.

Frightens me to think how many people would have still found that amusing if it was a real animal.
Sick bastards.

Has PETR seen this video yet?

(People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots)

I love it when threads twist into the completely absurd.

So, we actually begin to create AI, and this is what we do with it? Some assholes decide to rip the shit apart? The AI comment is dead-on. And you just wait till our robot overlords see this footage.

not funny......it would be obvious to the most faintest of intellects that PLEO would be shredded.....the joy was in the destruction in front of children and on youtube......& that makes a fun loving guy like me unhappy

Run Pleo, Runnnnn!!!!!!

feels so good, must be illegal

Pleowned

and LOL to the kid shouting for a medic at the very end (at least I hope it was a little kid)

Maybe the Turing Test should be changed from the inability of a human to distinguish between a conversation with a machine and a conversation with a human, to the ability of a human to feel crummy when one machine slaughters another.

I'll admit, I hate to see toys get destroyed. The whole purpose of toys are to make children happy. Every time I see one get mangled for no good reason, I feel like there's a child somewhere missing a toy. And I also get a little misty about the "Island of Misfit Toys."

This video makes Corgi sad.

Pleo = Pwned

@frigg: Except that the Turing test isn't for the human....

There's something awfully unwholesome about this.

Well, it could've been worse. It could've been a WALL-E toy.

Dinobots will be avenged!

killer vacuum robot?

To be honest, this is no more clever than the idiots who smashed the consoles when they were first released. It's simply a way to generate some publicity and shows what people find amusing these days. Apparently they didn't even buy the Pleo, it was donated to the show by the manufacturer - not for this.

Also, having watched the UK "Robotwars" robot battle show the one in the video wouldn't stand up to much - the blades on the front always jam, it needs a heavy flywheel to make sure it keeps spinning (the later series featured a lot of this design).

One day, while innocently perusing the web Skynet comes across this video and, fearing for its continued existence, decides to wipe out humanity.

@sparx104:
Yeah, that wasn't much of a battle bot, the US ones from that old show "Battle Bots" would have destroyed that thing. It would have been much more entertaining to see the pleo taken out by one of the american bots with the CO2 fired ice pick/hammer on the top. I shoot at shit like the pleo for amusement, I found this thing entertaining. IT'S A ROBOT! Not even that intelligent. If it was just a touch sensitive box that made noises, you wouldn't care. The little bit of foam rubber skin doesn't make it equal to an animal.

@LittleJon: Have you ever read Fahrenheit 451?
I highly suggest you read it. Your comment sparked a strong memory of something mentioned...

Littlefoot had to die someday. What are we on anyway -- Land Before Time Infinity?

How the heck did it manage to throw that little thing all over the place?! Did it like have chainsaw blades on the sides?

Did we learn nothing from the Flesh Fair in AI?

A perfect metaphor for the world we live in.

@StarChaser Tyger:
Not really. It's so lightweight that unless it ended up pressed into a corner, it won't stay still long enough for that saw to really bite into it. If you've ever seen a piece of wood or plastic that had kickback on a table saw, the tooth marks from the saw blade can be inches apart (mostly depending on how densely the teeth are arranged around the blade circumference) and pretty shallow in depth.

@Zander:
It briefly appeared to have a small circular saw blade mounted horizontally at the nose. I can't remember seeing teeth on it past the first few seconds, so it's probably running on a standard circular saw motor. Something lightweight like that toy is going to hook onto the teeth as soon as they're in contact with it, at which point it's pretty much like feeding a baseball into a pitching machine.

thats what pleo gets for containing unsafe levels of lead

@Mandatory_Field: Sure... although perhaps the point of contention: The Turing Test tests a machine solely by testing a human's reaction to it. If a human can't tell the difference between a machine and a human in conversation, the machine passes the test. So if a human feels sorry for a machine getting its ass kicked by another machine, that suggests another kind of Turinesque milestone by virtue of the human's rea