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a Pelican edition of Grey Walter's topic, and tried to build my own version of
Machina Speculatrix , using transistor technology rather than vacuum tubes. . . .
The subtleties of the original electronics were a little beyond me, but I did
manage to get my first robot, Norman, to the point where it could wander
around the floor, respond to light, and bumble its way around obstacles” (Brooks
2002, 27). From Australia he moved to the United States, completed a PhD in
computer science at Stanford University in 1981, and held postdoctoral posi-
tions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT and a faculty position at Stan-
ford, before rejoining MIT as an assistant professor in 1984. The first machine
that Brooks and a few collaborators then constructed was a robot called Allen,
which made Brooks's reputation, in certain quarters at least, and began his
rise to his current position as leader of one of the most important computer
science and AI laboratories in the world. And the point to grasp is that Allen
was very much an updated version of the tortoise. Using a ring of twelve sonar
range detectors in place of the tortoise's photocell and contact switch, and
solid-state logic elements instead of electronic valves, Allen would explore
its environment, pursuing goals (such as finding and trying to get to the most
distant part of the room) and avoiding obstacles along the way. Even Brooks's
construction strategy, which he called a “subsumption architecture,” getting
different layers of the control system working one after the other, mirrored
Walter's transit from the tortoise itself to CORA (see below). 35
So, if one is looking for a “weighty” answer to the question, what hap-
pened to cybernetics? one answer would be: it is alive and well in Brooks's
lab at MIT. But then another question arises. How on earth could one make
a reputation in computer science by building an updated tortoise thirty-six
years after Walter? Of course, Brooks displayed his own originality, but some
important history is needed here, which I want just to mention without go-
ing into detail. In the opening chapter I contrasted the performative brain of
cybernetics with the representational one of AI, and I need to say a little about
the development of the latter field.
The canonical history of AI dates its self-conscious inception to the six-
week workshop “Artificial Intelligence” at Dartmouth College organized by
John McCarthy in 1956 (Brooks 2002, 21-31). Many of the principles of the
nascent field were present, and what followed was a rapid purification, as
I called it above, but going in the opposite direction. From World War II to
the mid-1950s speculation about the mind in terms of machine models was
an exceptionally rich, diverse, and fascinating field, in which cybernetics in
many ways took the lead. From the mid-1950s onward a representationalist
strand of AI came to the fore, and it achieved institutional dominance within
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