Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #02470



To: Bob Shannon bshannon@tiac.net
From: Steven Bolt sbolt@xs4all.nl
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 22:08:17 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: CPU again?


On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Bob Shannon wrote:

> > 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.

You may thank your human vision system for that - the sensor system
you're adding to the equation.

[ uC-controlled `bots 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?

Imho what Mark Tilden does is not all that closely related to the
focus of the BEAM list.

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

That's true. Afaik uC-controlled `bots are welcome at the Games.

> > > 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!

It sounds like a clever marketing device. It has nothing whatsoever
to do with the Turing test, and proves nothing except the
limitations of your robot's body.

> > 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.

Fine. There is an even bigger difference between an automaton which
makes stochastic predictions and the learning abilities, the
creativity of life.

Best,

Steve

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# sbolt@xs4all.nl # Steven Bolt # popular science monthly KIJK #
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