The associated article seems to think that 50 steps is a long amount of time for learning this article. I would argue that 50 steps is nearly no time at all. Even though a human being may take less attempts to learn, 1) we are likely taking input from more senses than the robot is about what's occurring (we sense by stereoscopic sight, feel, etc. The robot may not sense by all of these.) 2) can apply knowledge from other domains in solving this problem (if memory serves me, this is part of the Holy Grail for artificial intelligence) 3) may make multiple attempts in our own minds before attempting to perform the activity physically again.

While I'm primarily experienced in Genetic Algorithms and NNs (so not re-enforcement learning, so much), 50 steps (or generations in a non-steady-state GA) is a very short amount of time, and so learning to properly coordinate multiple degrees of freedom into a successful activity in only 50 steps is, to me, pretty impressive.