GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 64

it conspicuously lacked in its formative years, a solid institutional base not
only for research but also for social reproduction, the training of graduate
students as future researchers with a prospect of recognizable career paths in
the field.40 40 And one concluding remark is worth making for future reference.
In the following chapters we will encounter many imaginative initiatives in
cybernetics which eventually fizzled out, and one inevitably wonders whether
this points to some essential flaw in cybernetics itself. I think we should re-
member that Walter's robotics once fizzled out, but that in retrospect it is
clear that the fizzling had more to do with the lack of an institutional base and
support than any inherent flaws.41 41
Cora and Machina docilis
AfTER fOuR YEARS [IN CAmBRIdgE] SPENT lITERAllY IN A CAgE ANd CHAINEd
BY THE ANklE—NOT fOR PuNISHmENT BuT fOR ElECTRICAl SCREENINg—. . .
ImAgINE, THEN, HOw REfRESHINg ANd TANTAlIZINg wERE THE RESulTS fROm
PAvlOv'S lABORATORY IN lENINgRAd TO THOSE ENgAgEd ON THE mETICulOuS
dISSECTION Of INvISIBlE NERvE TENdRIlS ANd THE ANAlYSIS Of THE Im-
PulSES wHICH wE INduCEd THEm TO TRANSmIT.
Grey WaLter, tHE LiVinG bRAin (1953, 51)
The tortoise served as a model of the adaptive brain, but only a primitive one.
It lived in real time, reacting to environmental cues (lights, contacts) as they
happened to it and never learning anything from its experience. Walter quickly
sought to go beyond this limitation by building in a second layer of adapt-
ability, and he concluded his first publication on the tortoise by mentioning
that the “more complex models that we are now constructing have memory
circuits” (1950a, 45). These more complex models entailed two modifica-
tions to the basic tortoise. One was to equip it with more senses—wiring a
microphone into its circuits, for example, to give it a sensitivity to sound as
well as light. The other was the addition of a clever circuit called CORA, for
conditioned reflex analogue (figs. 3.8, 3.9). Wired into the tortoise, CORA
converted Machina speculatrix to Machina docilis , as Walter called it—the eas-
ily taught machine. CORA detected repeated coincident inputs in different
sensory channels and, when a certain threshold of repetition was reached,
opened up a link from one sense to the other—so that the tortoise would
become “conditioned” to react to a sound, say, in the way that it had hitherto
reacted to the contact switch on its body. 42