STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 241

biological media may perform in similar fashion but on a more manageable
scale” (Pask and Curran 1982, 135). A few pages later he actually reproduces a
picture of a pond, with the caption “A real-life modular processor?” Likewise,
Beer in the text he wrote for a popular topic on the history of computing,
Pebbles to Computers : “Some thirty years ago, some scientists began to think
that biological computers might be constructed to outpace even electronic
achievement. At that time it was not clear that transistors themselves would
become reliable! Attempts were made to implicate living cells—microorgan-
isms—in computations. In England in the 'fifties, one such computer solved
an equation in four hours that a bright school girl or boy could solve in (maxi-
mum) four minutes. Its time had not yet come!” (Blohm, Beer, and Suzuki
1986, 13).
Biological computing enjoyed a happier fate in science fiction, making
its way into the popular imagination. With Beer's experiments on mice with
cheese as a “reward function” we are surely in the presence of the mouse-
computer that turns up in both Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy (1979) and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of fantasy novels. 16 The
most convincing representations of biological computing that I have come
across include the obviously organic control systems of alien space ships that
featured in various episodes of Doctor Who and, more recently, in Greg Bear's
novel Slant (1997), which includes a biological computer called Roddy (re-
combinant optimized DNA device) that is an entire ecosystem of bees, wasps,
ants, peas, and bacteria (and which succeeds in subverting the world's most
sophisticated conventional AI, Jill).
And back in the material world biological computing has, in fact, recently
been experiencing a resurgence. Figure 6.9 shows a cockroach-controlled
robot, recently built by Garnet Hertz in the Arts, Computing, Engineering
Masters Program at the University of California, Irvine. A giant Madagascan
cockroach stands on the white trackball at the top of the assembly, attached
by Velcro on its back to the arm which loops above the other components.
Motions of the cockroach's legs rotate the trackball, which in turn controls
the motions of the cart (much as a trackball can be used to control the motion
of the cursor on a computer screen). Infrared sensors detect when the cart is
approaching an obstacle and trigger the appropriate light from an array that
surrounds the roach. Since roaches tend to avoid light, this causes the roach to
head off in another direction. The entire assemblage thus explores its environ-
ment without hitting anything or getting stuck—ideally, at least. The cyber-
netic filiations of this robot are obvious. From one angle, it is a version of Grey