DON’T MISS

The 39th BP Portrait Award makes its annual trip to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery with its cargo of figurative experiments, some rather more successful than others. Known for its substantial prize money of £35,000, this year’s winner, Miriam Escofet, was awarded top spot for her arresting portrait An Angel at My Table, a portrait of her elderly mother. Elsewhere is the usual collection of children, lovers, strangers, friends, all depicted in a variety of styles, an insight into the world of portraiture today.

BP Portrait Award, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, 0131 624 6200, www.nationalgalleries.org, until Mar 10, daily 10am-5pm

says. “They said, ‘At least daily’. It’s quite a young child that moves beyond falling over, which shows how hard it is to create something that can walk on two legs – or indeed how advanced the human brain is.”

AI is certainly the 21st-century game-changer in the world of automata, and there are some truly staggering innovations on display here, but perhaps some of the most fascinating material in the exhibition – if you are that way inclined, which I am – is the historic mechanical devices and clockwork forms, from the manikin that was built to demonstrate the articulation of the human body in the late 1590s to the 18th-century drinking game automaton in the shape of a woman that, once wound up, twirls down the table holding a flagon of booze.

Where she stops, nobody knows, but they will drink when the mechanism runs down.

There are clocks and some wonderful orreries (mechanical models of the Solar System), representative of those devices whose intricacy and magic delighted kings and emperors from ancient China to Istanbul.

In a way it doesn’t, in fact, matter which era of automata we look at, whether futuristic or ancient – each can evoke a sense of awe – and chill – no matter that one works on an ingenious mechanical system of hidden wires, the other through an AI “brain”.

When it comes down to it, modern-day robotics researchers are, in a sense, still artificers trying to dazzle the king.

Robots, National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh, 0300 123 6789, www.nms.ac.uk, Jan 18 to May 5, daily 10am-5pm, £10/£8/under-16s and members free