DROID AND GROOM
Man weds bot
He tied the bot. A Chinese engineer has married a robot he built after struggling to find a human wife — and he already wants to upgrade her to do housework, it was reported on Monday.
Bot builder Zheng Jiajia, 31, wed one of his creations in a ceremony in front of his mother and friends in the eastern city of Hangzhou, according to the South China Morning Post.
Technically less than a year old, the bride, named Yingying, can say a few words and read a few Chinese characters, but Zheng plans on upgrading her to walk and help out around the house, the paper said.
On the surface, Yingying looks like a mannequin topped with a brunette wig.
The computer Casanova, an expert in artificial intelligence, decided to tie the knot with a bot after growing sick of his friends and family pestering him about settling down, a friend told the news site Shanghaiist.
Zheng’s heart was broken in college and he never really recovered, the pal said — although the groom himself waved that off as a joke.
He “dated” Yingying for two months before popping the question, the site reported.
During the ceremony Fri- day, the bride wore a black dress, pink stockings and a red veil over her head — a Chinese tradition — while Zheng donned a modern black suit and shirt.
Zheng lifted up his robo sweetie for a wedding photo, as if carrying her over a threshold, but admitted the 66-pound gadget was “a little heavy,” Shanghaiist reported.
It was unclear whether Zheng and Yingying are able to — or even want to — consummate their nuptials.
Mechanical mates aren’t Zheng’s only speciality. He reportedly also built a soccer-playing robot while studying for his master’s in AI at Zhejiang University.
He used to work at the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei but moved to the startup hub of Hangzhou in 2014 to focus on his AI ambitions.
This is hardly the first time someone has married a nonsentient sweetie.
A Chinese man got hitched to a cardboard cutout of himself wearing a red dress in 2007. In 2010, a Japanese man vowed to love and honor a pillow with a picture of an anime character on it.
And last year, an American filmmaker put a ring on his iPhone at a Las Vegas chapel, while a British artist wed a rock during an exhibition in Hong Kong.