Lucy and friend

Skinless

A scan of a small part of Lucy's brain

Lucy learning about lines and edges

The three muscle 'pairs' in Lucy's arm

Another view of her innards

Lucy's one good eye

The view through Lucy's eye

Some of the film crew from Equinox

Lucy with all her fur on

One of Lucy's pre-processor boards

The stack of pre-processors

You need small fingers to do electronics these days!

Lucy's school nativity play

Top-centre is the view through her eye (of a test pattern). Top-left is the activity produced by that pattern on V1. Bottom-right is the synaptic wiring of a fragment of V1.

She could have learned about edges just by looking around at the world (like we do) but a test pattern produces repeatable results

Conventional rdio controlled model servos. These were only barely powerful enough and quite noisy. Trying to solve these 'simple' mechanical problems in Lucy II has taken months.

The other was going to become a webcam but we never got round to it. Lucy II has two eyes with much better control.

It's a miracle she could see anything in such a low resolution image!

They shadowed us for about 18 months for a Channel Four documentary. Not a scrap of science made it into the program...

We abandoned the fur eventually - people prefer to see the mechanics inside

Four of these were linked together with some share memory into a parallel processing cluster.

She had one for each of: vision, hearing, voice and muscles/proprioception

Lucy's pre-processors were very fiddly to solder by hand. Her circuit boards were hand-made (Ann etched them on our Aga). Lucy II's chips are even fiddlier, but now we have better equipment.

(wishful thinking for a few years yet!)