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Even though she’s just 5 years old, Cindy Smart speaks five languages．She’s a good reader．She can tell time and do simple math, including multiplication and division．Cindy looks like an average doll, with long, blond hair, baby-blue eyes, and a button nose．But loaded with some devices, Cindy is the first doll that can see, think, and do as she’s told．The eagle-eyed Cindy follows in the path of other breakthrough toys like Sony’s barking Robot Aibo, which was the first to popularize voice command in the late 1990s．Cindy takes Aibo’s innovations(创新)one step beyond：she not only follows instructions but also recognizes shapes, colors and words, and remembers．The effect is a doll that appears to be learning．
The toy company which produced Cindy Smart spent a decade trying to see how much human nature it could breath into an inanimate(无生命的)object．Its engineers began creating minibots that sense light, sounds, and pressure．However, without the sense of sight, their toys seemed to be lacking in one of the abilities that life-forms use to react to their environment．
So how do the engineers make a doll actually see?In Cindy’s case, it’s a multistep process．When presented a text like “I love you” and asked “Can you read this?” Cindy identifies it as one of 70 preprogrammed commands．Then the inbuilt digital camera scans a 15-degree radius in search of number-or letter-shaped objects．Buried in her stomach, Cindy’s 16-bit microprocessor compares the text with her database of 700 words．If it’s a match, “ I love you,” she says．
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