let's imagine a simulation of large childlike legos!
the legos are huge, 1 foot by 2 feet. they're lightweight. they snap onto each other in shared 1ft square connection surfaces
we could consider a robot arm tasked with manipulating these legos
in the wild robot movie, the goose that was raised by a robot (which itself learned goose noises which the movie translated) learned to speak like a robot, different from all the other geese. it would wander around going "processing!" "planning motion path for worms!" or whatever
i took one class on robotics as an undergrad elective. there was a smart guy in the class but mostly it was a normal class, which is normal for classes everyone sits and takes notes and then a test repeat. it had a big thick book but i'm not sure if it really covered _that_ much it was mostly for factory robots. mostly i remember solving matrix equations for inverse kinematics. when exposed to academics one learns to formalize everything into linear numeric structures like matrices; things designed for leveraging simple approaches to problems at large scales in consistent ways. prior to this i did inverse kinematics with sines and cosines
robot arm: "lego is at 39 degrees! turning 39 degrees to the left! raising arm!"
[i guess that movie could have gone deeper into how logic systems could evolve caringness and meanings of life and stuff [oops part dropped] but it was a big stretch for them already to trick the robot into raising a goose