No, "stuck against a flat spot" is not possible.
Alas, that's always the way it is with magic -- much less impressive once you know how the trick is done. I guess the lesson here is that a good magician never reveals his tricks... ;>)
I understand that you have an intuition that the "missing piece" of artificial intelligence has something to do with state, and that the e=mc^2 of robotics may arise from this intuition. Perhaps you are right about this, I don't know. But I do know that this causes you to seek "state" -- even "hidden state" -- as a root principle of all you observe.
Nope. Not needed.
Oops! My bad. Ok, next time for sure
regards, dpa