"Is he real?"

This was the question every single, small child asked when they came to the door of my daughter's house this Halloween. My daughter Jenny and her husband rent the first floor of an old house in an urban neighborhood. On Halloween, they get tons of trick-or-treaters so my husband and I were happy to spend the evening with them, handing out candy to all the little kids. Jenny studies robotics and has a little, toy, robot dinosaur called Pleo. She set Pleo on the floor, and he wandered about near her feet as the children came by. Pleo does not look like the kind of animal that's around today. He looks like a cartoon version of a dinosaur. Yet, as he poked about at my daughter's feet, appearing to explore the world and make comments on it, he engaged every child that came by—and none of them knew for sure whether or not he was alive!

I was fascinated by this. "Do you think that the kids are fooled because he moves?" I asked my husband. "It's more than that," Dan said. "He moves like a real animal, like a little dog." Dan was right. Pleo did not move with stiff, robotic movements. He did not act like a wind-up toy. He seemed to move with purpose. For example he would look upward, his whole body suggesting that he, like a baby, wanted to be picked up. When Pleo stepped forward, his whole body, not just his legs, changed position. He moved with the unity and grace of a living creature. That's what was so captivating and confusing to the kids.