DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm David Greene. There's a legend in Russia about a fake town built to impress Catherine II. True or not, the term Potemkin village now refers to something made to look better than it really is, like, say, the robot featured this week at an event for Russia's future intellectual leaders.

Russian state TV boasted that he's already learned to dance, and he's not that bad - so humanlike. Because, as The Guardian reports, the robot was a human in a robot costume. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.