Watch: Noodle-slicing Ultraman robot!

It’s the dawn of a Brave New Noodle World! A new noodle-bot that holds dough and slices daoxiao-style noodles (刀削面) is popping up all over northern China, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you run into one soon.
Styled with a shanzhai Ultraman design (a totally blank-faced alien monster-fighting Japanese kids’ show), the robots fortunately can’t match the noodle-slicing speed of humanity yet.
The Pinocchio noodle-bots, however, already seem able to match some higher-level human functions, what with their obvious grasp of the absurd.
Though we’re winning the race for now, it’s really a matter of time before a noodle-making virtuoso will have to face off against the Machines in a fight to the death, as the great John Henry and Garry Kasparov did before them.
Then again, it might be easier to call a spade a spade, and admit that the assorted noodle-slicer robots are actually simple machines that perform one repetitive action, and that their “robot” portion is mere superficial casing. Sticking eyes on your coffee blender doesn’t mean it’s been imbued with artificial intelligence.
For real ingenuity, check out Wu Yulu in the video below. Wu, a farmer on the outskirts of Beijing, has built approximately 50 robots out of scrap parts over the past few years, and makes all his talking robots call him “Daddy”.

Related: Watch: Ping-pong playing robots!