Slashdot Mirror
Robot Maker Mark Tilden: All Life is Analog
simpl3x points to this New York Times article on master robotsmith Mark Tilden, writing: "It is interesting what makes a good toy." My favorite line is Tilden saying "I want to sell millions of toys, but what I really hope is that a bunch of kids who open them up use the motors and things to build something else ... They are my colleagues of the future."
He gave a guest lecture for one of my EE honors classes in my college days. Afterwards, I got a chance to talk to him a bit. He had some internship opportunities at the time.
.com wave. Oh well.
Sometimes I wonder how life would be if I took him up on the offer instead of dropping out to ride the
I understand Tilden completely. I design games for use with Icehouse pieces, and while I hope that the creators of Icehouse sell a lot of sets, I am much more interested in having people make lots of interesting new games with them.
Inspiring creativity is much more important than being successful in business, and much more rewarding.
I've got a young son, so for the first time in a long time I've been visiting stores like Toys R Us. I'm very discouraged to see just how little creative building and thinking there is in kids toys anymore.
What used to be an aisle full of model kits and parts and paints and glues is now full of pre-built and pre-decorated cars and planes, most of which have some sort of movie or TV tie-in.
What used to be huge boxes of random Lego parts is now pre-determined kits (more movie/tv links) with step-by-step instructions to get you from the start to the end. Encouraging creativity has been replaced by clone building (I must admit that I'm guilty of owning a Star Wars Lego kit of the battle-droid, so the irony of that last statement has not been lost on me).
I am worried that kids are loosing that tinkering instinct that got me to where I am now. I hope that I can instill that in my son. I didn't have Lego kits, I had a pile of Legos parts. I had a pile of resistors, caps, wires switches, motors, batteries, lights, some electrical tape, and a soldering iron. I built model rockets. I never bought a pre-made one.
So I'm right with Mr. Tilden on this one, though for the most part his employer (Hasbro) is just as guilty as anyone at stifling creative thinking in children's toys... but hopefully some kid will yank those things apart to see what makes them tick.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
His statement that life is analog is not *entirely* correct. The comment on nervous systems is an especially good example! In many ways, the nervous system acts much more like a digital system than an analog system. For example, there is no such thing as a "strong" vs. a "weak" pulse in a nervous system - it's an on-or-off thing, a 1 or a zero. A "stronger" message is sent by firing along the nerve more frequently. I don't think that ANYONE would consider that an analog design!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Analog Computing
:)
Binary computing has served the purpose of giving birth to the computer age but I feel we are missing something by not exploring other avenues such as analog computing. While there are plenty of capable D/A algorithms, nature does not have to resort to such stop-gap solutions. All of natures processing occurs in analog form, which me might be wise to pursue.
To quote Lee A Rubel:
"The future of analog computing is unlimited. As a visionary, I see it eventually displacing digital computing, especially, in the beginning, in partial differential equations and as a model in neurobiology. It will take some decades for this to be done. In the meantime, it is a very rich and challenging field of investigation, although (or maybe because) it is not in the current fashion.
Sincerely yours,
LEE A. RUBEL"
Jonathan W. Mills, a professor at Indiana University has an open request for graduate student's to assist in developing analog computers
Hava Siegelmann at the Technion Institute of Technology, claims in her thesis that some computational problems can only be solved by analog neural networks. Since neural networks are essentially analog computers, the work suggests, on a theoretical level, that analog operations are inherently more powerful than digital.
The most compelling example I can personally think of is that analog computers would allow you to work with perfect values of pi.
Interesting applications include strong cryptography/cryptanalysis. Where an analog crypto key would be uncrackable since it could hold a value such as pi or root 2, obviously incalculable numbers. On the cryptanalysis side, an analog computer would allow you to guess very closely the factors of large primes before turning that data over to A digital computer to brute force the solution from a very small range of possible values.
And yes, I need a job too
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
When I was in 1st grade I loved used to play with my 160 in 1 Electronic Project Kit from Radio Shack! That was a cool toy. I made everything project in it several times over. I remember building the siren and scaring my sister with it.
I went to find it or something simmilar for my daughters (who are 5 and 6) and could not find it. It was disappointing. The toys (or what passes for them now) require zero creativity to play with. Fortunatly that does not stop my girls from being creative. The general rule of thumb in my house for toys is that they do not require batteries, with a few exceptions.
We are going to start building model rockets soon!
~Sean
I remember seeing a show on this guy a while back and being pretty impressed with his results. His machines could have their legs bent and broken and still manage to keep moving (helps not to bother with error checking I'm sure).
I have to wonder what could be accomplished if the whole thing got more hobbyists working on it. After all many of his schematics are on Beam-Online and appear to be reasonable for amateurs to build.
At what point of ability/intelligence would these robots become slaves rather than simply "tools"? Should we not figure this kind of thing out before hand?
There's a Lego Mindstorms implementation of Walter's turtles.
People tend to read more into the behavior of purely reactive behavior-based robots than is actually there. That's why they get good press and make fun toys, but don't do anything useful.