Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #02463



To: Steven Bolt sbolt@xs4all.nl
From: Bob Shannon bshannon@tiac.net
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 14:08:04 -0700
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: CPU again? (was Beam genome)


Steven Bolt wrote:



> [ Robotic lawn mower ]
>
> > > But recognizing grass! I can't think of a sensor that will do a
> > > proper job. And I don't want to dig in a perimeter wire.
> >
> > This is a controller problem Steven. Its not a sensor problem.
>
> What our (un)conscious mind sees, feels, hears and so on has been
> preprocessed quite a bit, from raw data to information. I condsider
> that preprocessing to be a part of the sensor system; the
> controller is there, um, to controll.

I think I'm not making my point clearly.

I can drive a lawnmower over a simple video link with a fairly low
quality
video camera.

Clearly my personal controller (brain) has no problems doing this job
with
existing sensors.

Hence my opinion that your wrongly placing blame on the sensors.

> > Unless your lawn is on the move often, you could use differential
> > GPS to keep the mower on course and in bounds.
> >
> > Thats a better sensor than any in an ant!
>
> Ants perceives the green stuff and other parts of their environment
> well enough to farm. You may have been thinking transistors too
> long to see the hopeless inferiority of machinery when compared to
> life.

How on Earth do you know what an ant perceives?

> On Sat, 17 Apr 1999, Bob Shannon wrote:
>
> > My point being that the objections against CPU control (that are
> > a part of BEAM lore) are totally unfounded and incorrect.
>
> Who's objecting? I design and build uC-controlled `bots and enjoy
> it. They just don't belong on the BEAM list.

Based on what exactly?

Tildenhas backpedaled away from his early anti-CPU position. Why can't
the BEAM community follow its 'big god' and adopt better technology?

If BEAM is a philosophy, then how we implement that philosophy should
not
matter one bit.

> > At what quality of simulation do we enter the realm of emulation?
> >
> > In my past work with automata driven robotics we had a very simple test
> > for this.
> >
> > We had two identical robots, one equipped with an RF link to a
> > human operator. The other was under automata based control. An
> > observer interacted with the two robots in a controlled
> > environment and had to determine which was under human control.
> >
> > When the observer could no longer tell which was which, we
> > decided that the automata was truely 'intellegent'.
>
> In that test, the human operator is limited by the possibilities of
> the link and by the robot's body. Imho it merely proves the
> importance of the biological body and its sensors.

Again I think I've failed to make the point clear.

The human observer soon became unable to correctly identifiy which
creative
soltuions were the result of the human's best efforts or the machines.

this is a much more 'fair' version of the Turing test, it factors out
body
becase its common to both robots. It also factors out the social
aspects of
human life experiance that makes the original Turing test impractical as
a real
world test of machine intellegence.

And guess what, the machine passed the tests!



> > There is a big difference between adding a chaotic element to a robots
> > behavior and simply adding a randomness. This is especially true for
> > a leaning machine that must 'guess' at answers to new problems rather
> > than simply follow a pre-programmed set of rules.
>
> There is an even bigger difference between a guessing automaton
> and the learning abilities, the creativity of life.

Perhaps you should form these opinions after a bit more study Steven.
I quite specifically described stochastic predictions before guessing.

The difference you correctly describe above simply does not apply to the
case I'm describing.

> We have this wonderful new technology: electronics, and now those
> fascinating little uCs, cheap small camera's, lots of other great
> stuff. And as with any new tool, we get carried away a bit. Like
> the guy who just bought a hammer, and suddenly thinks that
> everything looks like a nail. Life is not a nail.

So stop trying to hit everything with a hammer before you have even
bothered
to check to see if its a nail of not!

Your making a lot of assumptions without the facts at hand first.

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