turing tape robot

Hi Eray, Curt, Bill, and other roboteers, I haven't had time to check
thru this yet, but thought you might be interested to take a look:

What Is Working Memory and Mental Imagery? A Robot that Learns to
Perform Mental Computations

http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.AI/0309009

This paper goes back to Turing (1936) and treats his machine as a
cognitive model (W,D,B), where W is an
"external world" represented by memory device (the tape divided into
squares), and (D,B) is a simple robot that
consists of the sensory-motor devices, D, and the brain, B. The
robot's sensory-motor devices (the "eye", the "hand",
and the "organ of speech") allow the robot to simulate the work of any
Turing machine. The robot simulates the
internal states of a Turing machine by "talking to itself."

At the stage of training, the teacher forces the robot (by acting
directly on its motor centers) to perform several
examples of an algorithm with different input data presented on tape.
Two effects are achieved: 1) the robot learns to
perform the shown algorithm with any input data using the tape; 2) the
robot learns to perform the algorithm
"mentally" using an "imaginary tape."