Open the pod bay doors, robot nerds. Your choices for best 'bots ever are ready to dock.

For the 90th anniversary of Karel Capek's play R.U.R., which popularized the term robot for mass assimilation, Wired.com unspooled a list of the best robot overlords ever.

We left off a few highly popular artificial life forms, and some short-circuited readers went haywire. At the center of the malfunction was a technical confusion over what defines a robot, a philosophical conundrum that started before Capek's play and continues to this day. (If you think the definition is technically restricted to human-like robots, we'd like you to meet Darpa's EATR, a foraging devourer of plant biomass that some puny humans worry might feed on battlefield flesh.)

So we decided to bow to our readers' iron will and let 2001: A Space Odyssey's sentient computer, Hal 9000, into the mechanical mix. Click through our preview gallery of other readers' choice robots above and let us know in the comments section below if we passed the Turing test.

Above:

I'm sorry Dave. You forgot to mention HAL 9000. Shall I sing a song for you? —Shelton Research Grp

HAL isn't technically a robot, he's a pissed-off, excessively anal AI. Still, I would like that song. —RP Bird

Not that I care ... but HAL is a robot.... He's the ship! Same with KITT of Knight Rider. —therantguy