Doin’ the robot, makin’ the pancakesIn the world of food, there is perhaps only one group of people more obsessed with robots than I am. That would be the good people over at Eater.com who, I’m guessing, have an entire staff dedicated to nothing but scouring the web for all food and robot-related information.Which is why they’re forever coming up with awesome little tidbits like this: a robot (well, actually just a manipulator arm, but still…) learning how to flip pancakes by reinforcement learning–which essentially means fucking it up until you get it right, the way most people learn most things. Granted, Eater picked up the story from Gizmodo (an excellent resource for all things robot-related, run by good people always on the lookout for signs of the inevitable robot apocalypse), but still, it was a good catch.But wait, you say. Is there a video? You bet there’s a video. Right after the jump.A robot learning to flip pancakes from Sylvain Calinon on Vimeo.Watching the robot go through its learning process is surprisingly amusing, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s only funny to those of us who’ve spent some time trying to teach dim-witted human line cooks on their first night in the whites how to flip pancakes–or eggs, or sauces or pastas or anything else that goes in a pan and, at a certain point, hope for that sweet wrist action of making the bottom the top, and the top the bottom.Having been in that position many times myself, I can say for a fact that the physical learning process the robot goes through is pretty much exactly the same as one experienced by an eighteen-year-old former Wendy’s employee standing his first bar shift in a 24-hour diner and desperately trying to figure out the necessary interaction between pan and cake. Even the part where the robot adds a little too much muscle to the pan and flips the pseudo-cake right up into what would’ve been its robot face (if it had a face). Especially that part. And at the beginning, when the guy had to literally hold the robot’s hand and show him what to do? Yeah. Been there, too.Honestly, though, the fact that the robot was able to get it after just 50 tries? That’s pretty impressive. I can’t tell you how many eggs get wasted every day by young cooks trying to get that first perfect flip under their belts. But maybe if more restaurants started using motion capture technology and millions of dollars in computer-assisted training, they could actually get a rookie short-order cook up to speed just as fast as a robot and possibly prevent a bunch of soulless, steely manipulator arms from taking the jobs of all the Denny’s night cooks in the world.