From various events that I won’t try to explain, I started pondering the age old question of how to figure out if someone is a robot or not. I present my findings (with discussion from outside parties).
- Use a magnet: Cheap and easy, but won’t work unless large machine parts are involved.
- Go upstairs: Again, cheap and easy but only effective on Daleks. And they tend to be easy to spot anyway.
- See if they like microchips: A dead cert to work, but really just a bad joke.
- Have a Voight-Kampff Machine handy: Turing tests at the extreme, but pretty handy. Problems: they don’t exist and if they did you might find out that you are an android.
- Hand them a knife: If they start slamming between their fingers at an alarming speed, then they’re Lance Henriksen and should be killed immediately.
- Cut them in half: Only works if there are large numbers of machine components. So, cut in quarters. Or, just keep cutting until you see wires. If you’re wrong, then they’re not going to complain. Downside: potentially murderous and fairly time consuming.
Those are my methods. If anyone has any better, I’d like to hear it.