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I am not a cylon

So, I am making my way through Battlestar Galactica Season Two, and I am enjoying it, but I am slightly annoyed that they have to make the cylons (who are supposed to be robots!) so stupid. I am sure that some of it is just for dramatic purposes, and you can make some kind of excuses based on the biological nature of some of them, and maybe there is some master plan we haven't seen yet that will explain their incompetence, but I doubt it.

Now, I know I should be enjoying the analogies to real-world political situations like terrorism and dictatorships and the struggle between security and freedom, but I just want to make surre the 'bots get proper representation. (I would also appreciate a good explanation of how the Greek gods made a comeback into popular belief at some point, but I am not holding my breath.)

So let's remember just a few reasons why robots are better than people:

• Robots can store state, make copies of their state, and restore to that state. This means they can learn much more quickly than humans, and should not repeat the same mistakes that other robots made.
• Robots should have much better ability to aim and fire weapons. Humans can get pretty good at this, but imagine how good a robot could be with the ability to control muscle movements more precisely, not to mention a more direct ability to calculate trajectories based on current environmental conditions. So, these firefights between humans and cylon centurions should not be anywhere near as easy for humans to survive.
• Robots should be much more resilient to damage than humans. Unless you destroy the main processing or storage areas, the robot should be able to continue to function with its remaining parts. And, actually, if the robots designed a more redundant system there may not be a main processing area to destory - each area could function independently if necessary.
• Robots should not be locked into a human-based physical form. The cylon raider ship was a good example of this. The cylon boarding party was not. If you are going to try to send something into a ship to take it over, would you make it big and obvious, so the humans can find it and destroy it? Or would you send something small and sneaky. Or, hell, why not just send a virus or other contagion to cause damage. Or maybe, send a bunch of things so the humans can't stop all of them at once.

The moral of the story? Be friends with the robots, because they will win eventually. And if you are writing about robots, try to make a plausible reason why they are flawed and can't reach their true robot-potential if you are going to have them lose. And if you are consuming media about robots - try to enjoy the ride, because it will almost always be disappointing in the end.