Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
2
result(s) for
"Waldrop, M. Mitchell author"
Sort by:
THE SOULS OF THE NEW MACHINES
''Today,'' Mr. [Hans Moravec] writes, ''our machines are still simple creations, requiring the parental care and hovering attention of any newborn, hardly worthy of the word 'intelligent.' But within the next century they will mature into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something transcending everything we know - in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants.'' Such beings need bear little resemblance to humans, he says - or, for that matter, to C3PO and R2D2 of ''Star Wars'' fame. To give a sense of the possibilities, Mr. Moravec imagines a treelike device that he calls the robot bush. It has a rodlike body about one yard long, where many of its sensors and much of its brain power are concentrated. It also has two arms, each containing a fair amount of brain power in its own right; four reasonably smart fingers; eight fingerlets - and so on until its ever-branching limbs finally terminate in roughly one trillion microscopic appendages. ''The bush robot could reach into a complicated piece of delicate mechanical equipment - or even a living organism,'' he writes. It could ''simultaneously sense the relative position of millions of parts, some possibly as small as molecules, and rearrange them for a near-instantaneous repair. In most cases the superior touch sense would totally substitute for vision, and the extreme dexterity would eliminate the need for special tools.'' First, is any of this (super)human robotics technology even possible? Here, Mr. Moravec is at his best. As someone who has been at the forefront of robotics research for nearly two decades, he has clearly done a lot of thinking about how to get from here to there. Some of the steps he proposes are admittedly sketchy. Nonetheless, in the early chapters of ''Mind Children'' he has given us a comprehensive and highly readable survey of the state of the art in robotics. He includes detailed discussions of sensors, grippers and mechanical legs - and why such ''simple'' things as walking and seeing are so much more difficult than ''hard'' mental tasks such as playing chess or proving mathematical theorems. The book is worth reading for these sections alone.
Newspaper Article