Robots in the rain

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As a computer scientist, it is natural for me to view the brain as a computer. And though computers have different abilities, they are also very much all equivalent at a fundamental level. You have machines that can read and execute instructions. Some machines can run faster, others can hold more instructions… but these are details.

Unlike digital computers, our brains evolved to support software functions that we do not fully understand yet. They are my kids. I can type at this computer. I could not reproduce it in a digital computer I would build. I am, nevertheless, convinced that there is nothing magical going on. There is no need for action at a distance or mysterious quantum effects. That we do not yet understand something does not mean that it has to be particularly complicated or that it requires techniques that are far above ours.

Innobody could build a plane. Inplanes were used for critical missions in the first great war. What Is the Duration of a Percept? Does that make consciousness and free will illusions though? Also, the chip can tell you a lot about itself, including which operations it supports. Somehow, Intel has not felt the need to insist that its chips have consciousness… because it is not needed.

Perhaps you need to define those things first? Science does not work that way. You introduce notions as a way to explain things. So apples fall to robot usual suspects poster maker ground.

Here, what I am saying, is that there is nothing that we observe that cannot be explained without having to introduce superfluous notions like consciousness and free will. If someone insists that we have free will, then this person needs to flush out the theory and then provide means of testing it.

When I robot usual suspects poster maker this, I do not have the burden of flushing out intelligent design. If you think that the concept of consciousness arises out our study of nature, then you need to explain how….

Their existence is relevant from a philosophical standpoint, not a scientific one. Implicit in the recent predictions regarding AI is the fact that computers may or may not acquire consciousness and free will.

I think it matters in the following sense. In the Terminator movie, that seems to have shaped so much of our view of AI… Skynet acquires sentience at a specific point in time. Before that point, the computer was just a computer. After that point, the computer robot usual suspects poster maker sentience, consciousness, free will… I think many people are waiting for this moment.

Our computers are already mathematically equivalent to us. A mouse is equivalent, in some robot usual suspects poster maker, to a human computationally. An iPad is equivalent to both.

Human beings have more computational power, and smarter software, than either the mouse or the iPad… but there is nothing really fundamentally different at a theoretical computer science level. There is no soul. If what I describe sounds self-evident and trivial to you, then please go to your nearest philosophy department and say those things.

Someone who insists that we do not have free will also needs to flush out the theory and provide a means of testing it. At robot usual suspects poster maker time, there are to the best of my knowledge no theories of free will or consciousness that could be tested by observation. And that means robot usual suspects poster maker these two terms are not scientific ones for now. What scientists say is that as far as we know there are no fairies or unicorns. The same applies to free will and consciousness.

Consciousness and free will are concepts that philosophers have been discussing for centuries, because they are part of human self-experience. Fairies and unicorns belong to the realm of legends that hardly anybody, at any time in history, believed to be literally true. I suspect no scientists has ever seriously thought about unicorns.

On the other hand, many scientists have tried to integrate free will and consciousness into some theoretical framework. There has been some progress about consciousness, although the current scientific approaches deal only with some aspects of the philosophical concept. Free will is likely to remain forever outside of science, because the non-existence of free will is a basic assumption of the scientific notion of causality.

Consciousness and free will are concepts that philosophers have been discussing for centuries …. That robot usual suspects poster maker discussed something does not make it credible. Philosophers spent a great deal of time discussing angels, or how matter is composed of 4 elements. And are you trying to robot usual suspects poster maker me that when I opened this article my reaction was predetermined?

I robot usual suspects poster maker more about other people than I care about myself. And how do you know that your view is the right one? If you were just predetermined to come to it? Software agents have debates all the time. All of distributed computing is based robot usual suspects poster maker the fact that we have different nodes with different point of views that must be somehow reconciled.

I can decide it does not exist because I cannot observe it nor can I observe its effects scientifically. The same is true of free will. There is no experiment that can measure free will. We have no reason to believe that brains can do things that computers cannot do, and we know that computers do not have free will.

There are a wide range of injuries, illnesses, etc. Largely but not entirely predictable if all the input were known, but in practical sense you do not know the input. With perhaps a hint of quantum in-determinism. The folk who want those boxes to be large, crude, and simple are wrong. The folk who get all mystical … not one of those. Might be nothing more than what we think we presently know. Might be a bit more. Robots are largely devoted to meeting some chosen external desires.

Humans are largely driven in-built evolutionary goals, but much differentiated my individual experience. My very speculative wildcard is that I am not sure that experience and time is a one-way arrow. We assume so as a simplifying assumption, and that sort of assumption is usually right. Usually is not always. How to put this to measure is unclear, so this remains a simple speculation. As an information processing device, yes, certainly. A brain is clearly robot usual suspects poster maker than a computer: But my main point is something very different: I think we robot usual suspects poster maker learn more by looking at the differences in information between brains and computers than by looking at the similarities.

There are plenty of computer scientists who work on quantum computing, DNA computing and so forth. So unless you can robot usual suspects poster maker that the brain can do computation that a Turing machine cannot do, then they are mathematically equivalent. This is a very deep result. There are plenty of differences between, say, a digital computer and a Robot usual suspects poster maker computer… and these differences are interesting… but the foundational argument of computer science is that core computer science results apply to any computer, whatever its shape and form… and that includes the brain.

As a physicist, I was thinking of the differences in the implementation of computation rather than in the underlying definition of computation. I will happily accept, at least as a working hypothesis, that brains are Turing-complete but no more.

It looks like they use highly redundant noisy processes. Computer science has no problem with probabilistic algorithms. Computer science has also no trouble building reliable computers out of unreliable parts.

Could not consciousness simply be the observations of a computer observing the computer? Here is how I understand consciousness:.

We have a cerebellum which could probably be equated to a computer such as a robotic system. Then we have frontal lobes probably where consciousness arises.

These lobes monitor, and can drive the cerebellum. An Intel processor observes itself. For example, if it is being very active, it will increase its power usage and its frequency. If the demand is less, it will lower its frequency. Are Intel processors conscious? There is actually a pretty good reason: Neurons are large cells, and the brain is itself quite big compared to, say, an Intel processor.

It is all pre-scientific wishful thinking.

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It will be updated as I discover more material. If you can identify the robot or you have further information about it, please contact me on cyberne1 at cyberneticzoo dot com. SeeZak produced Electronic instruments inc. Geiger counter; breadboarding and chassis components in the 's and 's.

Robot is to greet conferees on missile work in Sci Fi filming in Hyde Park, London The movie was shot in England Michel has no idea why a Cylon is driving the Rover. They have devised mechanical butlers, flute players, buglers, tambourine players, and chess players; but it remained for an American inventor to build the steel pedestrian Which draws along the city streets a Wheeled float weighing more than a ton. After several failures he adopted the present system of gears, cams, and cranks operated by the hp.

The big fellow is controlled quite like an automobile, with a throttle, clutch, and steering Wheel. He is 12 ft.

Most likely this giant iron man is the concept of Fern Pieper as improved by Chas. An "iron man" who can walk and may be a regular Percy, the mechanical man, was taken out for a walk Friday afternoon, by a man from St.

Louis, who wanted to test out the man prior to closing a contract to have him rigged up to help roll Liberty Loan bonds. The man was in a shed at the home of Chas. Oehler, who has been perfecting the ground work laid by Fern Pieper, whose ideas originated the walking mechanical man. The St Louis man could not wait, it is reported, until Mr. Oehler could be found to take the man out for a walk and the result was a crank broke in the mechanism of the man.

The mechanical man would not walk any further. A new crank was made and that was broken, too. Something had gone wrong. The mechanical man was at last pushed by six other men back to his shed where he will stay awhile. It was planned to use the man in parades to advertise the Liberty Loan.

He could not be put in shape for use in Alton next Wednesday, it is feared, but the St. Louis man was so attracted by the possibilities of the man he wanted to use him in a hurry.

The "man" walked to Ninth and Alby streets, where he stuck. He had previously been out walking on the streets at midnight, so he would attract less attention.

See here for pics. It was claimed for the old steam man that it was to be used for traction and other useful purposes ; but the new one commences its career with no such pretensions. All that is claimed for it is that it makes an interesting exhibition.

It has the same walking mechanism as the clockwork walking dolls patented some years ago [CZ: As an ingenious piece of mechanism, the walking steam man is an object of interest. Moore Sci Am article. If our memory serves us, we have. We never expected to meet those wonderful members in the flesh but no man knows today what is reserved for him tomorrow.

We have lived to see steam legs, steam arms, steam body and breeches, steam coat, hat and choker, all combined to eclipse all that poets have sung or dreamed. Passing up Broadway we saw large Posters announcing the greatest wonder of any age, past, present, or future, which wonder was explained, In smaller letters, to be an imitation of the human form divine, impelled by steam, and approximating in agility the renowned Hanlon Brothers [famous acrobats of the time].

We paused, considered, entered the place of exhibition, and found the steam man in a perfectly nude state, with the exception of his hat.

His other articles of dress hung upon …. We proceeded to take observations of his anatomy from drivers points of view. This engine propels a screw, which actuates worm gears; the gears acting eccentrics, which actuate the legs and feet, which actuate the entire man at a velocity of, we should say, about forty feet per minute, when doing his level best. His legs are merely straight bars, With large blocks of iron as feet, fastened rigidly to the legs. The legs are joined to the feet at the middle.

So that the heels are as long as the front part of the foot; and to keep the figure from toppling over side-wise, a flat bar extends laterally from each foot. To give the appearance of bending at the knee a toggle joint is attached to the front part of each leg, but this has nothing to do with the propulsion of the automaton [RH: This comment also mentioned in the patent].

There is nothing in the movement analogous to that of the human leg. One foot is raised and then advanced, the whole leg moving forward, not swinging, with the foot, each foot being alternately the pedestal or base upon which the body rests.

The fuel employed is some fluid hydrocarbon, and the boiler is concealed in the body. The smoke escapes through a hole in the crown of the hat. When the steam man is about to take a walk, his valet takes a pair of pinchers and after opening the throttle valve, seizes with the pinchers the end of a shaft which protrudes just below the abdomen, and giving it a partial turn, a most remarkable sound resembling the rumbling of wind in the bowels commences, and the steam man sets out upon his travels with a rather unsteady gait, and with extremely short steps.

When he reaches the end of his limit the steam is shut off, and he is turned about face by his faithful attendant, and retraces his steps in the same manner as we have described. On the whole, the steam man, is a curios automaton, and much more satisfactory than his predecessor exhibited two or three years since in this city, who could only stand upon fixed crutches and kick like a punky child suffering for a spanking.

See site here for more information plus an animation on how it works: Note that only one of its legs appears to be operational. See full patent document here. Notice it was assigned to the Hanlon Brothers, who get mentioned in the Scientific Americal article on this Steam Man.

Both the above patents have not appeared on the internet before. They are not found under the normal search criteria using Google patent search, either, and are the results of many tens of hours of indivdual patent searching, such is what I do for some of my researched postings. Ron Hezel came up with the name Thodar months before he came up with that explanation. Which is the way he likes to work. He call's it "reverse engineering" and it's a phrase that captures his style of inventing and his outlook on life.

Growing up in Brooklyn, a child of divorced parents, his fascination with electricity was primarily for self preservation. It wasn't until 9th grade that a teacher "sparked" his interest in the more practical applications. For his final project that year he built this Tesla coil. It's still powerful enough to light a florescent bulb. His interest in robots started early, when his father took him to the Worlds Fair. They became quasi celebrities, appearing with Jonathan Winters on the Jack Paar show and in all sorts of newspapers.

By the time he graduated high school, the boy who had hated school, had a full ride to NYU. And ended up teaching.

Still dabbling with new ideas, Ron and his wife now run a historic inn, filled with his collections and inventions. Light bulbs signed by Edison remind him of the man who never worked with a plan just knew that eventually he would get there and then he could explain how. Alas, like so many inventors, unbeknownst to them at the time they were not necessarily the first in their claims.

See timeline for earlier examples of Wireless robot control. Oehler American Wednesday, January 5th, Morrison American Sunday, July 11th,