Several readers submitted links to stories about BabyBot, a robot that attempts to model the environmental interactions of a newborn human. BabyBot is part of the ADAPT project. Roland Piquepaille writes, "Defining consciousness is a task that scientists and philosophers have never been really able to do. Recently, European researchers took an engineering approach to this problem in designing BabyBot." Marc sent us a link to a Science Daily story on BabyBot. While BabyBot does seem to mimic the learning behavior of a baby, there doesn't seem to be any substantial evidence of consciousness; perhaps because the engineers were trying to build something that wasn't clearly defined in the first place? On the upside, the years of research that went into building BabyBot have resulted in lots of useful research papers.