Compassion is perhaps overstating this. This was just inferring the immediate future progress of some other robots, there was no real inference of what the other robot was processing as it went, although for simple creatures like those robots you could say those two things are very close. And the headline is misleading again; how can the researchers really be shocked by this result, as this was what they were trying to prove. They might have been surprised at how well it worked, but to say they're shocked is journalistic exaggeration in the extreme.