Like a newborn animal, a four-legged robot stumbles around during its  first walking attempts. But while a foal or a giraffe needs much longer  to master walking, the robot learns to move forward fluently in just one  hour. A computer program acts as the artificial presentation of the  animal's spinal cord, and learns to optimize the robot's movement in a  short time. The artificial neural network is not yet ideally adjusted at  the beginning, but rapidly self-adjusts.