Nothing and Some More

Robots dot net (and the RSS feed)

iRobot mission: to be the leading provider of robot products and to supply developers with an industry-standard platform to create valuable robotic applications.

Beyond Computation a talk with Rodney A. Brooks is Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and C.T.O. Chief Technical Officer of iRobot, a 120-person robotics company.

In other computational experiments we're looking at very simple animals and modeling their neural development. We're looking at polyclad flatworms, which have a very primitive, but very adaptable brain with a couple of thousand neurons. If you take a polyclad flatworm and cut out its brain, it doesn't carry out all of its usual behaviors but it can still survive. If you then get a brain from another one and you put it into this brainless flatworm, after a few days it can carry out all of its behaviors pretty well. If you take a brain from another one and you turn it about 180 degrees and put it in backwards, the flatworm will walk backwards a little bit for the first few days, but after a few days it will be back to normal with this brain helping it out. Or you can take a brain and flip it over 180 degrees, and it adapts, and regrows.
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We're also trying to build self-reproducing robots. We've been doing experiments with Fischer Technik and Lego. We're trying to build a robot out of Lego which can put together a copy of itself with Lego pieces.
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At the wackier, far-out end, Tom Knight now has a compiler in which you give a simple program to the system, and it compiles the program into a DNA strip. He then inserts that DNA string into the genome of E. coli, and it grows into a whole bunch of E. coli. When the RNA transcription mechanism encounters that piece of DNA it does a digital computation inside the living cell, connecting them to sensors and actuators. The sensors that he's used so far are sensing various lactone molecules. It can then send messages to these cells by putting a molecule in a solution with the cells. They, in turn, then do some computation. In the two outputs he's demonstrated so far they produce other lactone molecules which diffuse across the cell membrane, and maybe go to a different species of E. coli that he has in the same batch with a different program running in them. He also stole a luminescent chain from a Japanese jellyfish, so he can make these cells light up with one big answer—1 or 0—depending on the results of the computation. This is still in its early days, but this, in conjunction with another program on amorphous computing, holds some promise down the line.

Self-Organization, Autopoiesis, and Enterprises and Francisco Varela.

Also interesting, I cook therefore I am, about monkeys,cooking, taming, brain size evolution and women.

There's still a huge tendency to downplay or just simplify sex differences in behavior and emotions. As we start getting a more realistic sense about the way natural selection has shaped our behavior, we're going to be increasingly aware of the fact that the ways that men and women respond emotionally to different contexts can be very different.
One of the dramatic examples is the extent to which men and women get positive illusions. In general, women tend to have negative illusions about themselves, meaning that they regard themselves as slightly less skilled or competent than they really are. On the other hand, men tend to have positive illusions, meaning they exaggerate their own abilities, compared to the way either others see them or they perform in tests. These things are certainly changeable. They depend a lot on power relations. If you put a woman in a dominant power relation, she tends to get a positive illusion; if you put a man in a subordinate relationship he tends to get a negative illusion.

How fast, how small and how powerful ? Moore's law and the ultimate laptop

When I think of all the information being processed there, all the information being communicated back and forth over the Internet, or even just all the information that you and I can communicate back and forth by talking, I start to look at the total amount of information being processed by human beings — and their artifacts — we are at a very interesting point of human history, which is at the stage where our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process. So I have to ask, how many bits am I processing per second in my head? I could estimate it, it's going to be around ten billion neurons, something like 10 to the 15 bits per second, around a million billion bits per second.
Hell if I know what it all means — we're going to find out. That's the great thing. We're going to be around to find out some of what this means. If you think that information processing is where the action is, it may mean in fact that human beings are not going to be where the action is anymore. On the other hand, given that we are the people who created the devices that are doing this mass of information processing, we, as a species, are uniquely poised to make our lives interesting and fun in completely unforeseen ways.

arXiv, creating a global knowledge network.

John and Anne Move to Paris. Well, they're considering it, to live the expat life for a while. So they record the websites they encounter as they consider and plan their move.