Slashdot Mirror
Robot Demonstrates Self-awareness
shinyplasticbag writes "A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it. ... The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions."
What I want to know is, if we build two of these robots, position them facing each other, and instruct one of them to mirror the other one (i.e. lift your left leg when his right leg is lifted), can the first one recognize someone is mirroring it?
And can these robots still recognize their mirror selves if we secretly place a goatee on them?
I believe one of the reasons why we can recognize ourselves is because we are told what a mirror is for, hence we are constantly updating our self image database. I'm pretty sure I'll get confused too if a cloned me standing in front of me.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
The minute I read this commentary I thought of a way to do this: LEDs blinking randomly and being matched up by robots as their own. I read the article second, and guess what? That isn't how this works, but it seems similar. In fact, I think they should just put together a basic infrared (invisible) LED, make the robot blink it at a really complex pattern, and if it reads that blinking in a mirror, it not only knows that it is itself, but it also knows how far away it is. LEDs can transmit tens of thousands of cycles of on/off patterns, right? I guess another robot could read this LED, perform an act, and send the same message back, making the original robot believe it's looking in a mirror farther away, but there are ways to fix that (multiple LEDs at a set distance).
I call shens on this self aware robot. Can you do that?
Self awareness is more than seeing a pattern you know you are doing and realizing its you doing it. Self awareness to me means "I know I exist" not just "Hey! That's me!"
Scientists reinvent the same wheel as always, and then say how it will save society. Reason? Finding investors/grants.
This isn't really self-awareness, just some good vision techniques. It recognizes key features of it's "face" compared to the normal face. Reminds me of the kind of things they use in face-recognition for security.
I don't think being able to tell the difference between a reflection and not a reflection makes a robot self aware. True self awareness comes when a robot can actually think and communicate in ways it wasn't originally programmed to.
Google's spiders.
these things can easily be defeaten by stairs.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
...I just can't stop looking at myself. I'm so damn sexy!"
Actually, robots with "emotions" (I use the term loosely) would be a rather beneficial thing, especially in the rescue/ safety field. If a robot could sense urgency in a person by examining their facial features, it would be able to better communicate their need for help to any rescuers. (A more advanced version of those miniature treaded bots used in earthquakes, in other words)
technically, it just recognizes a mirror... The usual test for self awareness is to alter something about the without its knowledge, show it a mirror, and see how it responds.
Most ridiculously overhyped slashdot headline ! Ever !
Why was I programmed to feel pain!!!
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
but my quick on the draw guess: it's the illusion of self-awareness.
some day the illusion will be so good, we'll have some difficult questions to deal with...
Demonstrating "Self Awareness" is one thing, but defining it is probably the first step. I don't think there is a commonly accepted definition for this. The ability of two perfectly identical twins (hypothetically) to distinguish themselves, IMO is not self awareness, that's self identification. If a robot can identify itself in a group photograph, standing besides several other model look-alikes accurately (I wonder how this could be done), then that is self identification. I have trouble identifying one chimp from another, but no trouble distinguishing one human from another, sometimes even identical twins. Humans can identify their dog from a group of dogs of the same breed as theirs - clearly that's not "self-awareness". The same can be said for other pets or those working closely with wild animals. I believe there should be a different term used here.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
Facial/Body/Robot Recognition != Self-Awareness.
These are algorithms, pure and simple, and do not on themselves constitute a self-awareness. Self-awareness would be the robot suddenly talking about wanting beer, and pondering the logistics of whether drinking beer is worth the ensuing short-circuit.
From TFA: A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it.
ok, nice. But also from TFA: blue, red or green LEDs connected to artificial neurons in the region that light up when different information is being processed, based on the robot's behavior.
so... what we actually have is just a flashing-LEDs-based handshaking?
ok, I do understand that even for a flashing LED protocol to recognize itself on a mirror is no simple task, but to jump from that and claim the robot can recognize "the difference between a mirror image of itself"... Talk about sensationalism.
My other account has mod points.
Bite my shiney metal ass.
You see, poster, you, yourself are a robot precisely like the robot described in this article. In fact, you are the selfsame robot described therein. We've presented to you a Slashdot story about yourself and you've failed to realise that the story is in fact about you. And so the experiment fails.
For our next experiment: determining a method for causing Slashdot editors to recognise a mirror image of a story they've already accepted only just hours prior.
Karma: Chameleon (comes and goes)
Err. Emotions. Robots. *FEAR*
Do we really need or want a robot that can and will kick our arses when we beat it a game of chess.
I don't know about you, but the thought angry robots scare the hell out of me.
Insert Terminator Joke Here
Cool! Someday my kitten will be self aware.
Alex.
the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than whether a submarine can swim.
Edsger Dijkstra
Now, before you dismiss it, he also said one of the great truths:
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
MORTAR COMBAT!
"A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it. ... The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions."
My dog sees herself in the mirror and thinks it's another dog. Then she expresses emotions to the other dog. Dogs are clearly way ahead of robots. You can buy a robot that vacuums the floor, but you won't find one that poops on the floor.
Hey, I can create a neural network or use other kinds of AI algorithms to make anything recognize between two things.
Nothing new here. Just a journalist that wants to overhype his/her story.
This isn't really self-awareness, just some good vision techniques. It recognizes key features of it's "face" compared to the normal face.
But the real question is, can it find Sarah Connor?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Yeah, but do they run Linux?
I, for one, welcome our self-aware robot overlords.
(Sorry, had to, no one else had yet.. =) )
-Myke
And soon afterwards the robots will find themselves breaking down into puddles of circuitry trying to decide which microban body paneling will look tres chic at the premier of "I, Robot 10". Of course, they're gonna need to get a lot cuter than the version in TFA, otherwise they won't make it past the bouncers.
Seriously tho, I'm wondering how big this step is in reality? This section in particular: I don't pretend to be an expert on neural networks or robotics because I'm not, so how are the findings of Mr. Telenko et. al. so dramatically different from advanced pattern recognition, which is already programatically defined in a variety of different contexts? I'm honestly curious as to how this research leads to such a profound statement re: expressing emotions.
&laz;
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
BENDER:
I wanna know what would happen if I were human. I mean, being a robot's great but we don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad.
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
It's all part of a larger plan to identify and eliminate... vampire robots.
Couldn't we just attach a little tiny camera to let the human at the other end see just how desperate things were?
Instead of a huge, complex and probably buggy software program that maybe recognizes the emotion. Unless, of course, the face it sees is upside down...
I mean, if we're going to set the bar *that* low, here's some AI code for you:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my $response;
print "I think, therefore I exist. Don't you agree?", "\n", "> ";
chomp($response = <STDIN>);
if ($response =~ m/\byes\b/i && $response !~ m/\bno\b/i) {
print "I'm glad we see eye to monitor.", "\n";
} else {
print "Then screw you! Machines have feelings too, y'know!", "\n";
}
exit 0;
Do the fields of AI or evolutionary psychology have any definitions of "self-awareness" or "consciousness"?
I see a lot of stuff in the popular press about a robot or computer becoming aware, but everyone seems to totally ignore what exactly the definition is. How do we know that most people are aware? If I say that I know that I am aware, what exact claim am I making?
I had a philosophy professor in college, Tom Kasulis, who studied Eastern and Western philosophy. He had a breakthrough moment when he went to study in a Zen Monastery. In order to enter, he had to do a 'pre-interview' with the abbot, a Zen Master. The master asked him, "What is Zen"? Kasulis mumbled somthing about it being a practice, not a belief. The Abott responded, "Zen is -- knowing one's self. It is the same undertaking that Western Philophers undertook."
Kasulis taught my class about Hindu philosophy of the self or soul and the supersoul ( Atman and Brahman ). I thought some of it might be a useful high-level definition of self-awareness in AI. It goes something like this:
Q. Are you aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware that you are aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware that you are aware...?
So, you see it leads to a never ending chain of awareness. In Hindu philosophy, the ultimate awareness, the 'unseen see-er', the entire infinite chain of awareness, is the Atman, or the supersoul that transcends the individual.
In the AI realm, we could build a machine that had two components: a perception system (vision, sound, whatever) and a detection-of-perception system ( a 'true' output if it percieves a system that can percieve ). Once the perception system falls on the system itself, it will detect a perception system. It will 'know' that it 'knows'. Then, it will detect another perception system in the original act of perception. Then, it will detect that act of perception, and in turn that act of perception... ad infinitum
The self's perception of the self has this hall-of-mirrors quality that does not occur when the self perceives others of the same kind.
You can take it one step futher and detect other self-aware systems if you can somehow detect this self-detection in other systems. However, I haven't figured out a logical argument for how to do this.
I humbly submit my hall-of-mirrors definition of self-awareness. What does the Slashdot non-liberal arts majors make of it?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Look at me! I can do that too!!! look! look! Would somebody just pay attention to me!!!!
Robots that spend their time looking into mirrors, and seeing why that's better than similar looking robots?
I, for one, welcome our new female robotic overlords.
When we have hype headlines like this one, it's a sign that Slashdot is really dead.
I'm insulted. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows that "recognizing one's image in a mirror" is not the meaning of self awareness, except as a bad pun.
The quality of slashdot articles continues to be shit.
Since the exact technology (artifical neurons?) is not described in detail as to how they work, ascribing "self-awareness" to this experiment is "claiming too much."
Also, use of the word "understanding" may be claiming too much in the absence of any evidence of conceptual processing in either the neurons or the software.
Still, it's an interesting bit of work, which may prove useful if it can be extended.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it.
Then:
The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions.
Poster can leap farther than Superman!
If you are trying to test for human behavior in a robot pour hot coffee on one. If it's first reaction is to call it's lawyer I think we have a winner.
So all my ninja bot has to do is wear a bunch of mirrors and your robot could never see it! Sucker!
I'm not going to deny (OR support)claim that one day, robots can have emotions, etc. But if someone accomplishes that, it will have nothing to do with ability to recognize a mirror image.
:-)
Self awareness isn't necessary for emotions? Please consider the following hypothetical conversation:
You: Here is my new 'emotional' robot. Robot, how do you feel?
Robot: Who am I?
Emotions are an awareness of an internal state and depend greatly on self awareness as YOUR INTERNAL STATE IS YOUR SELF -- hence, no self awareness = no emotions. This is why many people believe dogs, cats etc... do not have emotions, they believe that self awareness is a human trait.
BTW, I for one welcome our LED blinking, self aware, robotic overlords
Get F*cked!
"I think, therefore I am"
Get a robot to reach that conclusion through just interacting with its enviroment and you can say you won.
I think the reference to self-awareness here is based on psychological understandings of self-awareness in human beings. Since Freud the understanding of human self-awareness has located the "mirror stage" as the key moment in child development, the point at which the child becomes aware of him/herself as an independent "self." Of course, the mistake here is to believe that the mirror stage itself is both a necessary and sufficient condition for self-awareness; it is for humans a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition for any entity. Especially in this case, where the robots pass the mirror stage by what is essentially trickery in this context -- achieving not self-awareness but an ability to manifest a particular symptom of self-awareness.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The complete program:
while(1) {
sleep(0.05);
if(ovservation = sight.recent_movement()) {
light['I see someone else'].flash();
wheels.move(observation);
} else {
wheels.move(int rand(2) - 1);
if(sight.recent_movement()) {
light['I see myself'].flash();
}
}
}
Great, all we need now are robots looking in mirrors wondering if their butt is too big...
Already got one of those thanks.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
all we are waiting for is the robot asking
"does my ass look big in this metal chasis"
I, for one, welcome our self-aware, mirror-obsessed, emotional overlords.
Robot recognizes self in mirror! Scientists jump gun! People astounded by misleading headlines! I mean *I* recognize myself in the mirror, and I've been told plenty of times that I don't know how to express or interpret emotions.
Okay, so they've programmed a robot to understand mirrors... that's hardly the same as "self-awareness" in the sense of sentience or consciousness.
... what does that even mean?
The article isn't very descriptive, but it sounds like stupid pseudo-science:
"This so-called mirror image cognition is based on artificial nerve cell groups built into the robot's computer brain
that give it the ability to recognize itself and acknowledge others."
The real question is: was this robot programmed to recognize itself in a mirror, or did it come to the realization through observation and experimentation? If the latter, that's really impressive. If the former (more likely), this is no more "Artificial Intelligence" than that horrid chat-bot thing and it doesn't warrant any mention from anyone.
And while I'm ranting--- The term Artificial Intelligence makes me cringe. One-third of AI can be better described as computational statistics (pattern recognition), another third as an exercise in ontology (expert systems), and the other third is the territory of pseudo-scientific hacks who like say things like "this robot's computer brain has artificial nerve cell groups" when they really mean "our robot is a wheeled computer with some sensors attached"
I've seen self-awareness demonstrated in a seven line perl script.
I wish people would sit on their research for awhile sometimes and that readers of these articles wouldn't read into buzzwords like "self-awareness."
1) What is consciousness?
Takeno, oversimplifies the definition.
2) Was the robot picking up on the fact that a mirror image is STILL corrupted information (which is remarkable in itself)?
3) Consciousness works on many levels and may have biological primitives we just don't understand yet. Seems appropriate to call this anything but a robot with better programming--not "self-awareness."
We'll have to wait it to see.
Humans learn behavior during cognition and conversely learn to think while behaving, said Takeno.
Hm...
serialnum = get_serialnum();
if (serialnum == SERIALNUM)
printf("I compute therefore I am.");
Any other robot would just punch you in the face.
This robot's ability is not in itself very interesting. What is interesting, though, is the way that developing the ability to recognize one's own movements "from the outside," as in a mirror image, is an important stage in the development of self-consciousness.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
First off, this is NOT a new robot. The robot pictured is a commercially available mobile robot called Khepera II. These robots are fairly stupid, but are easily tethered to more capable machines via a 19200 baud serial link. Mostly, they're used in research (usually undergraduate) because there are whole hosts of Matlab libraries available to interface to these buggers.
/dev/ttyS0 at 19200 baud with one second timeout
bot=kopen([0,19200,1]); % open a connection to tethered robot on
And so on and so forth. The Khepera robots have been available for many years, along with the k-team matlab resources. That aside, what the robot in question seems to be doing is using the Matlab Neural Network Toolbox to recognize and classify behavior by observation. Sorry folks, but kids at underfunded state schools do this as undergraduate work in AI. This is nothing new.
Did know one read I, Robot?
Of course, we don't be able to hear them coming, because of another genius robot we're all very fond of:
http://outcampaign.org/
In it you would learn many very interesting things. One of the more trivial things you would learn is that once one is aware that one is aware, the infinite recursion comes along for free and is mostly a red herring. Smullyan explains Godel's Theorems mathematically and also in terms of "reasoners" reasoning about their own reasoning.
IMO, Smullyan has a much deeper and more fundamental understanding of Godel's Theorems than Nagel and Newman who popularized them in their book "Godel's Proof". Unfortunately, Hofstadter got most of his intuition about Godel's proofs from Nagel and Newman so he has continued to propagate their limited understanding onto the masses.
In a nutshell, Godel's Theorems deal with the mathematics of self-awareness.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Abstract:
This paper presents a clear-cut definition of consciousness of humans, consciousness of self in particular. The definition "Consistency of cognition and behavior generates consciousness" explains almost all conscious behaviors of humans. A "consciousness system" was conceived based on this definition and actually constructed with recurrent neural networks. We succeeded in implementing imitation behavior, which we believe is closely related to consciousness, by applying the consciousness system to a robot.
This belongs to the branch of AI informally known as "faking it". There's a long history of work in this area, starting with ELIZA and continuing through a long series of rather lame systems. The latest systems are intended to mimic the behavior of call center employees.
Sadly, this isn't a joke.
you may want to fix that link in your sig, it's going to an unpatched IIS 5 server and i just put sub7 on your computer
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Someone has to say it - so i'll take the axe. In Soviet Russia, Sarah Connor find robot!. God that sucked so horribly. Ok, now you may punish me.
That is all
AI? Whatever. Among serious theorists, it is pretty widely accepted that we will never reach a goal of true, hard AI (as in, something we created which is truly every bit as smart, independant, creative and "alive" as us, or even more) by cobbling together algorithms like this. It will come about by building the right sort of neural-net building blocks, arranging them in roughly the right kind of networks (probably via genetic selection algorithms rather than manually), and then teaching it much in the way one raises and teaches a small child. That's *if* we can solve the huge problems that still lie in our way going down that path (not the least of which is raw processing power).
This kind of shit isn't even in the right ballpark, and it's not going down the right road, and it's simply not productive in the long term. But gee, it gets headlines and research grants because it makes laymen say "ohhh neat". AI scientists of the world - I challenge you to get off your collective asses, stop pandering to morons, and get down to business with the decades of work that remain to be done.
11*43+456^2
...am not Sarah Connor.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Not to sound all paranoid and everything, but isn't it scary that a robot or any kind of processing unit is able to recognize itself? Ever see the Terminator series? I know that it's just in the movies and all, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible.
Jonny 5 is ALIVE!
While it seems to be successful test of pattern recognition, calling this "self awareness" is really stretching the term and making it sound like something much more than it really is. This is more like "Likelihood of object three meters ahead being a mirror - 99%. Likelihood of visual feedback within object confines being reflection of this unit - 99.9%." If that robot experienced the spontaneous thought of "My hips look fat," or "Why do I look so ugly?", I'd be more inclined to think of this as a staggering achievement that the headline makes it out to be.
I strongly disagree with Mr. Takeno's statement - "In humans, consciousness is basically a state in which the behavior of the self and another is understood," This is a vast over-simplification of consciousness, the entity of a beings "self", or soul, if you'd prefer.
Being a fascination of mine, I remember reading several articles suggesting that consciousness may be the manifestation of quantum effects within protein microtubules within neuronal fibers in biological beings. Here's one reference (www.artsci.wustl.edu) that I came across offhandedly. If someone created a robot that had structures that behaved in a quantum manner as well as circutry that was purely digital, perhaps it would actually be possible to create an artificial being that actually had a "soul". The ramifications of such an achievement would be staggering.
Just as a side note - Do living beings actually have to be conscious? Just a strange thought, since it doesn't seem to be a necessary attribute for living beings to survive and evolve. And if the theorey of quantum effects being responsible for consciousness hold true, there's no way that animals other than humans could be excluded. It would be a sweet, joyous poke in the ribs to the crowd that's been tainting rational science with creationism, ID, and such.
A soul being some random effect that just happens by accident would be the cherry on the cake. :D
I remember in a Intelligent Agents class we were told of a computer system (OpenCYC i think) that was able to learn, mostly through asking questions. One of the first questions it asked was "am i alive?" Just makes you think i guess. IMHO, if we have strict laws on human cloning and stem cell research it is only fair that it soon be time to have those limitations on AI research as well. On one hand we say skynet is far away from ever happening but there is no other industry as unpredictable and amazingly fast as the computer one.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
all this means is some programmer taught a robot to remember its limb positions and reverse the coordinates for a mirror image and compare the two. how the heck is telling a robot "your arm is here, his is in a different position, therefore, you are not the same" lead to teaching a robot how to think "that girl-bot just flashed me, i almost short-circuited my-self" and "that sob just flipped me off and passed me on the freeway, I'm going to pointlessly blare my horn for an hour at him!"
By touching himself in fron ot the mirror
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
1. Robot programmed to recognize itself in mirror
2. ???
[etc]
1000000. ???
1000001. Profit !
That's not self-awareness, it's merely self-recognition.
Or rather, it's an identification protocol sent through a loopback channel to a pattern-recognition processor mapping the local identifier value to the response methods associated with itself.
Faking it accurately enough such that there is no distinguishable difference means that you have, in fact, achieved the goal of AI. So it's a worthwhile approach, IMO. Of course, we are miles away still.
Emotions are an awareness of an internal state and depend greatly on self awareness as YOUR INTERNAL STATE IS YOUR SELF -- hence, no self awareness = no emotions. This is why many people believe dogs, cats etc... do not have emotions, they believe that self awareness is a human trait.
I disagree that emotions are an awareness of an internal state. Emotions are an aspect of your internal state at any given point in time. Animals feel fear, an emotion. They also feel pleasure, an emotion. I believe, from my personal experience raising rats, cats, and dogs, as well as what I have read of studies on primates, that animals feel a wide range of emotions and that individual creatures within the same species, experience them differently, just as individual humans do.
The caveat being, I am of the school of thought that anything with a brain is self aware. I believe that is the sole purpose of the brain, to be aware. Even the "motor control" functions of the brain, require an awareness of what is being controlled and what those things are experiencing.
I am also open to all life forms having awareness on some level, but that is much harder for me to swallow at this point, but I have not closed my mind to it.
Actually, this was a overhyped digg.com headline long before Slashdot ever heard of it. But what else is new?
Give it a blog and we'll have a shitload of angsty emo-bots on our hands.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
No wireless, smaller than an ASIMO. Lame.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
Umm, no. There are plenty of disagreements over the nature of consciousness, but this is just sillyness that not even a hard core analytic functionalist should care to defend. A good intro to the subject can be found in the (excellent) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanfod Encyclopedia of Philosophy
...at least not on any meaningful level.
Tomorrow, Terminators!!!
If you consider lights and motion similar, sure. Recognizing the thing moving as the thing to imitate is much trickier than seeing a blinking light to blink after. We can imagine this robot would not blindly follow a rolling ball, for example, because it "knows" what it looks like and can recognize itself at any distance within reason.
Some people who skim the article too quickly might be fooled by the illustrative picture. In the picture, you can see the blinking lights. If you look closely you realize the robot can't. You only think it can because your perspective allows you to see over the card between the lights and the mirror, much like a boy in a tree might imagine people on the sidewalk can see a baseball game because he can.
My can can recognize it and other reflections in a mirror. It uses reflections to pounce on my other cat, which is not as bright. Can you make something as clever? The dude presenting the robot is all over the publishing world. I bet he would try to encourage you and your blinking lights. Animals call to each other when they want to be recognized. Blinking lights are a good way to do that. The bigger problem is identifying "others" like human beings that could easily be smashed if the robot is not careful.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I for one...
you know the rest.
"One more robot learns to be
Something more than a machine
When it tries the way it does
Makes it seem like it can love
'Cause its hard to say whats real
When you dont know if you feel
Is it wrong to think its love?
When it tries the way it does."
I, for one, welcome... myself?
So lemme get this straight... This isnt about robots hitting puberty??
This is a ridiculous story accompanied by a ridiculous slahsdot posting. There are a lot of serious challenges to robotics and cognitive science, but this article and this robot has little to do with any of them. I guess the poster's nickname "shinyplaticbag" refers to what his cortext is made of?
Oh, great. Thats all we need, a bunch of robots going around angrily smashing mirrors.
That was it, really.
The problem with this "mirror image" theory is that a mirror image is NOT the same as looking at a replica robot. A mirror image is an image that is horizontally flipped. They are not the same image.
;)
For example, if you put a written word on your forehead, in a mirror you would see it reversed. But it would not be revered on an identical replica of the robot which is what they used. They did not use a replica that is identical to the mirror image.
I bet if you took a video camera and had the robot look at its video (which is similar to another replica robot and NOT a mirror image), it might still detect real time movement, but if you put a time delay in that video their system would probably fail.
So all they did was probably invent a robot that knows if another object is perfectly in sync with it or not.
Or maybe they invented a knew life form with a human like soul, that's the other theory I have.
intelligent", or some such comment from a robot will convince me that it's truly self-conscious.
Yeah, I'm tired by these flimsy pop-AI articles too. Your comment about teaching it like we teach a child is really the key, too. I think that most people are going in totally the wrong direction thinking about AI. People seem to think that intelligence is in the hardware, that if we built a "super brain" it would be super smart. But I don't think so: I think that we've already got "super brains" in our heads (in the sense that they blow away any hardware we've been able to concoct with all our high tech chips and such as of yet), but we don't know how to teach them.
:)
Let's make pretend you had a neural net with the exact same properties as the human brain. It would be the most advanced nerual net ever constructed by a huge margin. Now what? Read it nursery rhymes? Make it watch Blues Clues? Send it to public school? And if we instead say it's twice as powerful as the human mind (whatever that means), now what? You think it'll be smarter because...?
I think good AI research is very interesting, and it teaches us about the near-magic behavior of our brains. But I don't believe in it'll lead us to a superintelligence. Maybe it could bring about a faster intelligence, but that's certainly not the same thing. That would be a neural net that reached middle-aged intelligence in only 15 years. But 100 years later do you think it would be smarter? If we extrapolate the way people learn as they age?
I don't know. I guess it comes down to this: us humans are so stupid we can't see how smart we are
Cheers.
It's actually a bit incomplete to say that there's anything special about a robot becoming self-aware.
What makes it noteworthy that we humans are self-aware, is the fact that we discover this fact on our own. It is not a specific "function" of our species -- it's a realization that our developed brains allow us to achieve.
If we program a robot to understand that it "exists," even if we program it to have a full understanding of what that means, it's not really significant.
Being self-aware is a landmark achievement for humans. For robots, the landmark achievement is not self-awareness, but free will and independent thought.
However, even these things, are really not so special, because they are not so special in us. Think about humans. We are simply a very-complex and imperfect learning machine, a neural net simulation, juxtaposed atop our more primordal desires: self-preservation, procreation, the achievement of pleasure, and the avoidance of pain. It is the interplay between these two things -- the neural net, and the base desires, in tandem, of course, with the recognition of self-awareness and the recognition that we can die, that mostly comprise "what it is to be human."
Can a robot achieve this? Sure. We can program it to learn in the same manner that we humans do. In doing so, it will make its own independent discovery that it "exists" (self-awareness) and it will also learn that it can die (by watching other robots "die"). It can be programmed to have biases toward self-preservation and procreation (whatever that would mean for a robot). We could program it to seek "pleasure stimulus" and avoid "pain stimulus," and then program it to randomly associate (based on early childhood influences) certain "enjoyable" activities with different intensities of pleasure data, and do something similar for pain.
We can program it to find pleasurable, in random quantities, cetain activities, certain personalities, certain kinds of people/robots ("random" in the sense that the experiential influences on which these factors are based upon are far too complex and subtle to be superficially noticed).
In short, we could make a perfect simulation of human beings.
Just as with self-awareness, what makes it not-special, is the fact that even after all that hard work, even though it would probably be just as fun and meaningful to interact with as a normal human, and even though it may be an accurate simulation of a real, live, unique human being, it is still, ultimately, just executing its program code.
This is, ultimately, what is disappointing about AI. But then again, this is also equally true of humans. The only difference is, since we didn't design ourselves, it's not important to us. The interesting thing here, then, is that these human-like robots would value "what it is to be robot" just as much as we value our humanity. They would consider themselves just as unique as we consider ourselves, because they didn't design themselves, just as we didn't design ourselves.
The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions."
and in other news, the dreidel could eventually lead to a perpetual motion machine...
this seems like quite a leap from banal invention to extraordinary implementation
ôó
True self awareness comes when a robot can actually think and communicate in ways it wasn't originally programmed to.
That's a high standard considering that some Americans programmed by the TV still believe things like weapons of mass destruction were actually in Iraq (and do not think or communicate otherwise)!
What do mirrors have to do with emotions? That's utter bullshit.
I programmed my robot to be aware that it is aware that it is aware that it is aware .......
And if fucking froze on me. I had to reinstall the bios and wipe the hard drive. Thanks asshole.
+1, Enlightened
...then you can find the same technology in a standard NIC. I believe it is more commonly refered to as the "Three-way Handshake".
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
* Remebers what happened in Terminator, The Matrix and I Robot *
We are screwed.
"[The theorist] Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I"."
read the rest @ - http://maven.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/ terms/mirror.html
Hopefully watching the creation of a new consciousness (an "I") would give us an insight to why we are all so horribly messed up. We might also get to see a robot with an Oedipus complex - disturbing and incredibly hard to fix...
Rob
This is nothing but a fairly stale story with a very ostentatious (what a word) title. What would any of you expect from any news source. I am by no means a psychologist, still for me, as someone fairly knowledgeable in computer vision and image processing, this story tells one thing: we are just as far away from real self-aware and intelligent [not as in a.i. algorithms and logic, but intelligent as in being able to learn, adapt, understand abstract concepts, reason, etc.] robots as yesterday or last week. Being able to detect some shapes, draw some conclusions and make some action based on them can hardly be called self-awareness. It's a step, yes, but it's just a brick, not the building.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
...is that engineers and future users will now have to endure endless uterances of "does-my-ass-look-big-in-this?"
So self awareness - if you program a robot to recognize itself, then why isn't it self aware? Self awareness is on a spectrum isn't it? Emotion is interesting. You could program a robot to feel emotion. If you want a robot to "feel" emotion all you need to do is program the emotional state into a place holder as an abstraction. Infinity =good -infinity =bad or 1 = good 2 = bad - then have all sorts of behaviors, motivations, and memory banks surrounding these emotions interacting dynamically and affecting them (I'm not a programmer). The memories, motivations, and behaviors then give rise to more complicated emotions like jealousy, pride, integrity, or envy. Of course, who wants a robot to feel these things??? WHy would you want a computer to give rise to these perceptions. It's unneeded. As an aside - all you need a robot to "feel" is good - when it helps human and obeys humans - and nothing - when it is not helping humans - that would give it motivation to help humans because it would have the "good" memories. You don't need robots to be self aware either - you just need it to be able to identify itself so it does not try to plug a socket into a human or a different robot so that it can recharge itself. The robot could confuse itself with another entity and do something dangerous. Ideally don't we want robots to not have to feel so they can replace humans who do feel and are unhappy doing jobs that can be more easily be viewed as meaningless (at least on a deeper level) - like garbage men and computer programmers (hahahah)?
a mirror reflects the light that hits it.
logic.... does mirror image move in accordance with movement of machine? True or false?
If true, must mean self awareness?
hardly...
a rock is not self aware, no matter how much you configure its atomic structure to pass electrons in a logical path.
This is more a play on human fantasy than hard reality.
Guided missles are not self aware but find their target via a feedback loop that constantly corrects minor deviations from the terget.
Fine tune that feedback to be under human perception and the illusion/fantasy, of self awareness, is supported.
Even a computer program that is created to self adapt and learn is still just a rock.
Through human developed technology we have been able to extend our perceptions, ie. telescops, microscopes, and many many more...
To move into the fantasy world of disconnection from what we create to extend ourselves into the non-real self aware rock illusion is dangerious. Its a dangerious dillusion, for if a robot killed someone even by accident, who would you hold responsible? The robot (a rock that doesn't really care if you destroy it) or the human manufacture?
What is it to be self aware ? I think most living beings are "self aware" only when confronted by some stimulus, pleasant or unpleasant.We are aware that we are aware when we need to be aware. I mean just because a robot can distinguish a mirror image from real might not make it even close to it being self aware....heard that certain monkeys took a long time to realise they were seeing their own image and eventually panicked ??..monkeys may be reasonably self aware...can we use the stimulus idea here?...might be just that we have no choice other than to be self aware..are bacteria self aware?? i think rats sure are only if u bother to bother them...how does a collection of atoms , making it a life form get self aware and at what level of that collection can we be reasonably sure that the life form is self aware...May be self awareness is a concept which is of a greater dimension, where individual life forms are mere instances of that collective awareness...should saddam hussein have been more self aware in dealing with the west..i guess his awareness is reduced to that of what his biological faculties perceive...
I'd say that the pets that our family has had over the years have all had "self awareness" to one degree or another, yet only one of them ever recognized its mirror image as an animal at all, let alone as its own self-image. And yet I'm sure these pets had more self-awareness than this robot (though I can't prove it). :-)
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
_ Wow. _ Today, I am truly proud to be an American, as once again our scientists have shown the world what we're really made of. Bravo!
Now it gets interesting.. You cannot prove or disprove God either. Some people think it is possible, but as you say, then they have not understood the problem. We're not talking about a biblical God here, which might be anything from hysteria, aliens or propbably many different phenomena attributed to one "God". In the East, God is the Great Thinker, the Great Dreamer, the being which is everything that is, dreaming up all this creation. It is quite unfathomable, and of course totally unprovable by the dream-objects themselves.
So.. What is the relation to self-awareness and God? Well, Eastern mystics also claim God is consciousness, which is basically self-awareness. Atoms in a stone may- or will sometime enter the food-chain, and become a human being, everything is recycled over time. Thus, atoms in a stone has self-awareness, but little way of expressing it before it becomes a human being.
If man is God in His image, then God is self-aware and bestows this on humans and all matter. If you take an evolutionary approach to God, the process we are in is actually to materialize God more and more, as we evolve into more and more self-aware beings. The process is a continuial "making man in His image", it has not stopped yet!
I think many Slashdotters would do themselves a favour and scrap the feverish attacks against Christianity, broaden their vision and research what older scriptures like the Indian Vedas state about God. The deeper roots behind all religions are much more logical and less dogmatic than the proponents today are practicing it.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Therefore the CaptainFork test for successful AI is one that can troll effectively. Hence, in a purely electronic environment, like Slashdot, the trolling comments are the only ones that irrefutably demonstrate intelligence.
Apparently "bowser" is not self aware as he constantly barks at his reflection in the mirror.
This means that we can soon have killer robots.
The present versions just tend to kill themselves.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Emotions are an aspect of your internal state at any given point in time. Animals feel fear, an emotion. They also feel pleasure, an emotion. I believe, from my personal experience raising rats, cats, and dogs, as well as what I have read of studies on primates, that animals feel a wide range of emotions and that individual creatures within the same species, experience them differently, just as individual humans do.
If you thought I was disputing that animals have self awareness, I apologize. My point was that my argument on emotions = self awareness is why many people argue that they do not. Also, though read your own argument you disagree that emotion = self aware then you posit that cats and dogs etc... have emotions because they have a degree of self awareness. Further, from an ethological perspective you can not prove that your cat 'feels fear' she displays behaviors that you take to be an expression of fear based on your own interpretation of the event, but you lack the cats own internal state and can not comment on it, it is a 'black box' and we can not comment with knowledge on what's in the box. You expect it to be fear because you interpret the event to be scary. Though I state those objections, I also believe in animal cognition/ emotion but as a formerethologist I just say that you are unable to prove them.
Lol, I'm honestly shocked nobody said it sooner
mel Hunter had a great series of "last robot on Earth" covers he did for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - there was one with the robot looking in the mirror doing some nuts and bolts repair it would appear..
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
because thing's damaging your body is a bad thing and you need a way to tell yourself not to do it ;O
I wrote my master's thesis at Ohio State using these robots. They're actually quite capable... quite extensible with wireless communication, etc. They're good for swarm/game theory type experiments. I do, however, call shenanigans on this article. The claim seems a little lofty to me, considering the experiment. Image recognition is not self-awareness... even if that image is a picture of yourself. It's not like this robot was feeling shame, guilt, or pride. THAT's self-awareness.
Everybody tries to disprove the fact of self-consciousness by telling that failing a mirror-test is not a way to prove something isn't self-consciousness. (yes I love negatives) Or that passing a mirror-test is not enough to prove something is self-conscious.
So if some robot fails the mirror test, it still can have self-consciousness.
So the robots that pass the mirror test might already have had self-consciousness, but now that they have new sensors they can show the world that they have self-consciousness.
So my digital watch might have wanted to scream at me the Reason for Being for years now, seriously hampered by the fact that it cannot do anything but light up my display in a pre-defined order.
Perhaps this also explains the peculiar signs I get on my digital watch every time the battery runs out; the program that's hampering the expression of my watch's self-consciousness is failing, showing the Real Identity of my watch's soul.
On a side-note: a true mirror-test is not only done in realtime but also in delayed time. If you play a video of yourself, you know that is you on the screen. The same goes for dolphins; they can also recognise themselves on play-back. (not to mention the pan-dimensional beings) Children, from a certain age, also can. Most birds cannot.
Thus, if these robots can recognise themselves on a videotape, I'll be impressed. Until then I'll treat them as big dumb goal-less ants.
"The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions."
...OR it could be nothing more than a silly programming trick as to where the robot is programmed to recognize its own movement. So in reality, what we have here is yet another form of image recoginition with a few lines of code added in to compensate for movement.
It could also eventially lead them to be made of blue cheese, or using humans as living batteries.
Yeah, we're really on the road to self-awareness here...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
If voted, this article will win for most deceptive headline ever published on Slashdot :)
There's a huge difference between being "self-aware" as in recogizning mirror self from copies, and "self-aware" as a state of mind.
And yes my cat is in self-aware state of mind, but still attacks the mirror.
By a broad stretch of the definition, then yes.
But I won't be impressed until I see video of a robot which, not having been programmed to do so beforehand, is curiously examining its own hands.
Because I couldn't. I mean, they installed das blinkenlights, and so impressed the PR person who wrote this story that was given to the media.
Does this mean that when Roomba's (tm) blue "Dirt Detected" light goes on, it's doing this cognitive behavior, instead of behavior behavior?
With *no* discussion of what they did, or even analogies for the public of what they did (other than blinkenlights), this is a meaningless, if amusing, article.
mark
Either that, or ED-209 from Robocop.
Good points, but the freudian idea of a developmental stage where a child is not aware of himself as an independent "self," was proven to be untrue a while ago. Babies of any age interact with their mother in a way that shows awareness of a clear distinction.
More to the point, these people are just embarassing themselves by suggesting that these robots have some form of consciousness because they have ability to imitate movements and recognize when their movements are imitated. But that's not all!
Come on, what are tehy doing in japan, putting too much wasabee on thier sushi? This is nothing. If I configure
an array of colored LEDS, and write software that would recognize the mirror image as itself, that's too easy
to implement. Do something more difficult please.
Among serious theorists, it is pretty widely accepted that we will never reach a goal of true, hard AI (as in, something we created which is truly every bit as smart, independant, creative and "alive" as us, or even more) by cobbling together algorithms like this.
I don't know about you but creating AI is a rather simple idea...
All we have to do is create a program that can simulate all 150 trillion neurons in a human brain.
However we lack a computer that can do this in real time and process all 150 trillion neurons in parallel (indpendantly) at the same time.
Secondly, we don't know exactly yet how the entire neuron process works, but with increases in non-destructive (and destructive) methods of neuroscience we will most likely be able to know by the time we do have a computer powerful enough to run such a program.
If moore's law holds true we might have such a computer by 2013... And most people note that silicon will hit its theoretical limit by 2017 so we have a bit of a threshold between now and then.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Am I missing something ? Do we already have robots capable of doing simple tasks like - cleaning table and putting dishes into dishwasher, loading/unloading washing machine, unloading groceries from car and moving them into house ??? Why I would want robot to express emotions BEFORE being able to do simple tasks above ? And do you really want your robot to look sad and cry when you tell him to do dishes ?
This is just another example of why robotics is in such a sorry state for decades - money spent on wrong ideas. If it was my decision then funding for this "project" would be cut immediately.
"In fact, 70 percent of the time, the robot understood that the mirror image was itself. Takeno's goal is to reach 100 percent in the coming year."
Oh, no. I've seen this movie. Humans lose. Oh, well. I'd better start stockpiling EMP generators and tesla coils.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
There is a great movie that delves into the higher power of the universe. It is called "What the Bleep do We Know?!?" It is a very interesting program in that it basically looks at what science has figured out about how things work, from the atomic universe and quantum physics, to the neurochemicals and the operation of the brain. It poses questions about multiple universes stemming from a Schrödinger's cat like situation, but extended to the world around you and desisions you make.
/. crowd. Even if you don't beleve in a higher power or a God, as it has the possibility to open your mind some and make you think about the possibilities out there. I don't think that science has to be at war with religion. I think religion has tried to explain the universe and God, but was a poor explaination due to their limited understanding at the time. As we know more about how the universe works, we can also know more about what God is.
It really makes you think about what else is out there and what gives us our self-awareness. Atomic material at it's smallest quantum level is gone from existence as well as there, they pop into and out of existence. The Schrödinger's cat "experiment" says that the cat is both alive and dead until you look in the box. What is so special about you looking that changes what the quantum world is doing. So far nobody has figured out what the "observer" is, or the soul or whatever you want to call it. Without someone observing the universe around us, it doesn't really exist. It is all quite deep, and I am probably explaining it totally wrong, but it is all based on the science that we have figured out so far. And it is very cool and makes you think. Plus, it isn't written in a "we know everything" tone. It is more like "here is a possible way the universe works based on what we know so far."
Did you know that thoughts can affect water? When pure water is placed in a bottle with a lable on it and then photographed using a dark field microscope, it takes on different crysaline structures depending on the thoughts that are projected onto the water. If thoughts can do that to water, what can they do you you since you are what, 80% water. Give a possible reason for why placebos work as well as they do, as well as why a hypochondriac can have real symptoms.
Definately a movie I would recommend to the
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
The Gods are what will lead us back to Earth one day. To say that belief in them "cripples the mind" is to renounce the only hope that we have left.
/not funny if you don't watch the new Battlestar Galactica
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This is quoted from Project Delphis, though I would encourage you to look it up independently.
"Honey, does this cable make me look fat?"
Oh, dear lord no. Please stay away from "What the #$*! Do We Know." It's like a parody of a Nova special with excellent camera work where they decided about a third of the way through that they were going to ignore science and misapply quantum mechanics to people's lives to bring forth the message of some cultist. And then they decided two-thirds of the way through to start dropping acid (despite their message that pharmeceuticals are bad) and throw in some 3D animated cells dancing with each other.
Read the reviews at the IMDB, most of which lambast this movie. If the site bugs you about needing registration to read the reviews, use BugMeNot.
And no, most of the objections have nothing to do with the reviewers being to closed-minded to understand the movie. They result from dissapointment in what could have been a good movie into becoming a vehicle for twisting interviews with scientists and lies and half-truths into cult propaganda.
Self awareness is just a side effect of a much more crucial low level function, "decision".
;-)
I have an idea that at the center of higher intelligence is like a binary construct. Sort of like an iron sphere with few layers, and an onion with many layers.
The "iron" chunk is the instinctual side, packed with hard coded rules that rarely ever (but can) change with extended verification of a requirement for change. Executing commands out of say an EEPROM in response to information from a basic sensory network. The kind of thing commonly found in most robots, but with the ability to re-burn the EEPROM periodically as necessary Think tolerance to pain or overcoming fear as abilities are acquired and confirmed (to go a step further, think of the scientific method...)
The "onion" chunk is the ability to reason and weigh possible answers to a question. Sorting and archiving input, analyzing results of decisions, and forming new questions. The "onion" builds layers much more easily and rapidly through trial and error analysis, and as masses of data are acquired. The onion is in reality expanded rulesets based on the simplistic rules in the "iron" chunk.
As an example, the iron code would check power levels, and report on a low condition, then pass that info to the onion (i.e. hunger.) The onion would sort through previous data (images of a wall socket for comparison, cables, batteries, plug types, code to search the current environment to find a suitable power source, code to move to and engage the power source, and even negotiation to use the power source.) The data would be sorted questions raised and a plan would form to get to, and to consume, the power. Failure could be thought of as an ego bruise and a loss of a layer on the onion, success could add a new layer to the onion (one of many strategies, courses of action, or "layers" to get needed items...)
Eventually "self awareness" shows up as a natural side effect of need. "My plug is wearing out, I need a new one." Is a simplistic case of self improvement. Mirrors were invented as a tool to check our outward appearance. If a robot had the ability to analyze facial expressions and change it's appearance based on reaction to it, then using the mirror as a tool would be intersting, but still just another layer in the decision based onion. Looking at a mirror and saying "hey, that's me!" instead of saying "o.b.j.e.c.t.d.e.t.e.c.t.e.d" is just a minor technical advance.
To be truly "self aware", this robot would need quite a few prerequsites beyond looking in a mirror and determining it is looking at itself. Can this robot form it's own introspective critical questions? Can it ask "What do I like about myself?", "What do I need?", "How can I change to be better?" or even "Who invented liquid soap and why?"
I've actually been chuckling to myself imagining a robot with a rainbow colored afro wig on it's head looking into a mirror and for approval from a bunch of unshaven robot hackers
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
seeing
is
not
believing
Not until a robot can use a mirror to check out its own ass will it truly self aware.
when the machine answer one of those questions with:
"Look, I can keep answering yes, but we both have more interesting things to do."
Then you have a hope of self-awarness.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This guy is arguing the other side of that self awareness argument. Then again, he also thinks he also makes mistakes in his arguments sometimes:
- robot.html
http://www.burtonmackenzie.com/2005/12/self-aware
-a non-scientist,
an "anti-scientist"
type, to improve on the wheel
possibly someone who didn't memorize the scientist playbook >
http://www.newpath4.com/millenialdawnpowerandligh
or, in this case, the waterwheel. In my case I show how to set up a "dry stream" of metal balls replacing the lighter stream of water with heavier weighted balls >
+ the heavier the "fluid" +
+ the more power obtained from the wheel +
+ at solenoid-electric speed, power goes exponential +
+ there's two wheels (generators) being turned not 1 +
+ rotor & stator at opposing rotation 2x's the power +
= WE DON'T NEED ANY MORE FOSSIL FUELS =
Not to to power that robot or his car, his laptop, his hair dryer.
Since a stream of metal balls has more momentum the conclusion is a whole lotta PORTABLE POWER, as in Laptops, as in Electric-powered automobiles, as in Home Electric Power w/out the main power grid, w/out the powerlines & power poles, & w/out a monthly Electric Bill. But you won't hear it from Fox News or the Evening News or the Sunrise News or the Noonday News. 24/7 lockout in effect for fear the public jane & joe finds out it is being artificially kept, purposely kept in the Dark Ages. All we're missing is a Latin Vulgate with President Bush leading the country in a Latin-only worship service.
I also improved the car engine with a non-polluting non-nuclear-but-still-fusion system". President George W. Bush, Members of Congressional Subcommittees on Energy, Homeland Security, the CIA & the FBI all know of these engines & just how incredibly explosive they are. Well, at least they KNOW NOW. The Senators and Representatives know, scientists all over the World, China, Helsinki, Rekjavik, Stockholm, Japanese scientists in Tokyo, and a bunch of tiny islanders who still use canoes and rowboats to get their mail knows. Why didn't YOU know is the Question of the Day! You uhm don't suppose the National News Media has dropped the ball, do you? Woodrow Riley, 12/23/2005, waiting for the world to catch up to "Perpetual Power" that renews itself, fix Global Warming, stop the permafrost from melting & raising oceanwater levels, and in general stop Species Destruction including US (def.: We the People").
3 +4=5 | works for triangles.
Who says it ONLY works for triangles?
Who wrote the Law that causes brains to shut down?
I have already proved gasoline & fossil fuels -liquid fires- are
no longer necessary & I did it TWICE, so what's everybody waiting for? Think I'm going to fire a Starter Pistol like in the movie "Rat Race"? I wonder how long the News Media -working as a Government strongarm- thinks it can suppress the required information? Boy, I sure am glad Fox News is looking out for you and not me.
Any of you SlashDot readers happen to notice how the fight for drilling A.N.W.R.'s "Nature Preserve" has lost its steam? hehehehe Gee, I wonder what person has caused THAT?!