Carnegie Mellon Has A Scrabble-Playing Trash-Talking Robot Named Victor

Meet Victor, a robotic creation at Carnegie Mellon University that plays a mean game of Scrabble, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The games are literally mean - Victor is programmed to trash-talk his competitors. Dorcas Alexander, a tournament Scrabble player who faced off against Victor, told the Wall Street Journal that she "thought he was going to be a better player than he was" - the people behind the project decided that it'd be boring to play a computer that won all the time, so they only gave him fairly middling Scrabble skills.

By dumbing him down and giving him a cocky personality, Victor has some rather human-like characteristics.