your stories are lame... almost as lame as the comment you love to add at their ends. I think you are too old to be so childish and I sugest you hang yourself to a tree... but of course, I'd have to explain to you what a tree is... and it's so hard that I don't even know from where to start. OK, let's say you'd better unplug yourt computer and suck its power plug... don't forget to make a video, of course ! hasta luego, minablos censor.
why doesn't the/. code-pissing man want to give me the possibility to browse comments at -1 ??? I don't consider the ones above as funny. most of the time, these consist of lame me-too-er that get upmodded to "+5 inforsightful". could also be nice to have anonymous cowards marked as one's foe. and why did this story appear so laaaaaate with already 8 comments in it ?
there's a vagina port inside ??? should please most nerds, especially the one that are too lazy to find a wife... the others would maybe prefer it to have an anus.
...a triangle that would be pink, for example... if I had one, I'd have fun hacking it to send my parents the coordinates of some coca farm in Columbia. or maybe some CIA opium fields in Afghanistan;-)
Yep, it's because the department secretary was actually passing by to have a chat with me... Guess you, Americans, are not even allowed to stare at your female coworkers because
It could be interpreted by these frigid creatures as sexual harassment (quite a nice guitar solo by FZ, on the other hand...)
You are gay, anyway and your male-partners would beat the shit off you for just looking in the right direction.
According to the IBM songbook: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/barryf/songbook.ht ml
OUR I. B. M. SALESMEN
Tune: "Jingle Bells"
1. I. B. M., Happy men, smiling all the way.
Oh what fun it is to sell our products night and day.
I. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J.
In his service to mankind-that's why we are so gay.
2. I. B. M., Watson men, International line:
Proud T. M. - Dayton Scale - and I. T. R. so fine
I. B. M. goods and men, leaders all the time.
Saving money, time and men, in every land and clime.
No problem, I won't land on your Moon anymore, I have loads of stuff to do on Earth at this moment, like giving your mum enough decent genes to bear a better a you but yuk... what a slut !
Not at all. The second is not computed as a 86400th of a day but rather as a multiple of the oscillation frequency of some particle. I doubt these particles were oscillating a quicker way in these dark ages. BTW, your nick desserves a "+1 Funny" whereas your post desserves a "-1 moronic".
Posted by
timothy
on Tuesday March 26, @09:20AM
Peter Wayner writes: "A long time ago, I posed for a portrait at a
church fair. The priest wandered by, paused for a
second, and then caught up to me later. "Do you like the picture?" he asked. When I said it was
fine, he told me, "Oh, I think its terrible. It
doesn't look like you at all. But that doesn't
matter. The artist is supposed to create a
picture of what you think you look like." Read on to see what this has to do with robots as Peter reviews Rod Brook's new book.
In a way, robots are portraits of humans. Machines
are just machines and assembly lines are just
assembly lines. The buckets of bolts don't become
robots until they start to take on some of the
characteristics and a few of the jobs of humans. A
drill for tightening a bolt may replace a biceps,
but it's just a motor until it's on the end of a
fancy mechanical arm that positions it
automatically. Then it's a robot ready for a call
from central casting.
Defining just what is and is not a robot is not an
easy job for technologists because the replicants
and androids are a touchstone and a benchmark for
measuring our progress toward the future. It's
2002 and everyone is asking: Where's mad Hal
steering a space craft to oblivion? Or more
importantly: Why am I still vacuuming the floors
and mowing the lawn by myself?
If you are asking these questions, then you might
want to read the answers Rod Brooks, the director
of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
offers in his charming book, Flesh and Machines:
How Robots will Change Us. The book is half a
thoughtful biography of the various robots created
by his graduate students and half a philosophical
explanation of what to expect from the gradual emergence of robot butlers.
The biographical part is probably the most
enjoyable. He and his students have produced more
than a dozen memorable robots who've crawled,
rolled and paced their way around MIT. One
searched for Coke cans to recycle, one tried to
give tours to visitors, and another just tried to
hold a conversation. Brooks spends time outlining
how and why each machine can into being. The
successes and more importantly the failures become
the basis for creating a new benchmark for what
machines can and can't do.
An ideal version of this book should include a DVD
or a video cassette with pictures of the robots in
action because the movement is surprisingly lifelike. Brooks is something of a celebrity
because a film maker named Errol Morris made a
droll, deadpan documentary that cut between four
eccentric geniuses talking about their work. One
guy sculpted topiary, one tamed lions, one studied
naked mole rats, and the fourth was Rod Brooks,
the man who made robots. Brooks minted the title
for the film, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, a
phrase he uses to describe his philosophy for
creating robots. The movie tried to suss out the
essence of genius, but it makes a perfect
counterpoint for the book by providing some visual
evidence of Brooks' success.
One of the stars of the movie was a six-legged
robot called Genghis, a collection of high-torque
RC airplane servo motors that Brooks feels is the best or most fully-realized embodiment of this
fast and cheap approach. The robot marches along
with a surprisingly life-like gait chasing after
the right kind of radiation to tickle the IR and
pyro-electric sensors mounted on whiskers. If
you've seen the film, it's hard to forget his
gait.
Brooks says that the secret to the success of
Genghis is that there is no secret. The book's
appendix provides an essential exploration of the
design, which is short and very simple. The soul
of the machine has 57 neuron-like subroutines, or
"augmented finite state machines" in academic
speak. For instance, one of the AFSMs responsible
for balance constantly checks the force on a
motor. If it is less than 7, the AFSM does nothing and if it is greater than 11, the AFSM reduces the
force by three. That's doesn't seem like very much
intelligence be it artificial or real, but 57
neuron-like subroutines like this are all it takes
to create a fairly good imitation of a cockroach.
Brooks calls this a "subsumption architecture" and
the book is most successful describing the days
that he spent with his graduate students building
robots and seeing what the architecture and a
handful of AFSMs could do. He half mocks the
roboticists who load up their machines with big
computers trying to compute complex models of the
world and all that is in it. In his eyes, the
lumbering old-school machines just move a few inches and then devote a gazillion cycles to
creating a detailed, digital description of every
plant, brick or wayward child in the field of
view. After a few more gazillion cycles, the
machine chooses a path and moves a few more inches.
Even when they find their way, time passes them
by.
There are no complex control mechanisms sucking
down cycles on the machines from Brooks' lab, the
source of the claim that they're "out of control".
It's just AFSMs wired together. One of the robots
fakes human interaction by tracking fast motion
and flesh colored pixels. Brooks marvels at how a
few simple rules can produce a machine that is
remarkably life-like. If you're not sure, they
have video tapes of lab visitors holding
conversations with the machine, who apparently
takes part in the conversation with the patient
interest of a well-bred host. As if by magic, the
AFSMs are creating enough human-like movement and
visitor in the tape begins treating the robot like
a human!
If you're still not sure, you might buy a "My Real
Baby" doll designed by Brooks with the help of the
adept mechanical geniuses in Taiwan. The story of
taking a highbrow concept from MIT to the local
toy store is a great part of the book. The
so-called toy is filled with AFSMs that tell it
when to gurgle, when to pout, when to sleep, and
when to demand sustenance. Alas, the toy makers
tell Brooks that the market can't stomach so much
innovation. One new thing at a time.
So are these machines truly successful simulacra?
Are they infused with enough of the human
condition to qualify as the science-fiction-grade
robots or are they just cute parlor tricks? Some
readers will probably point to the AFSMs and
scoff. Seeing the code is like learning the secret
to a magic trick.
Brooks, on the other hand, is sure that these
machines are on the right track. In a sense, he
makes it easier for his robots to catch up with
humans by lowering the bar. On the back of the
book, Brooks ladles out the schmaltz and
proclaims, "We are machines, as are our spouses,
our children and our dogs... I believe myself and
my children all to be mere machines." That is,
we're all just a slightly more involved collection
of simple neurons that don't do much more than the
balance mechanism of Genghis. You may think that
you're deeply in love with the City of Florence,
the ideal of democratic discourse, that
raven-haired beauty three rows up, puppy dogs, or
rainy nights cuddled under warm blankets, but
according to the Brooks paradigm, you're just a
bunch of AFSMs passing numbers back and forth.
If you think this extreme position means he's a few AFSMs short of a robot professor though, don't
worry. Brooks backs away from this
characterization when he takes on some of the
bigger questions of what it means to be a human
and what it means to be a machine. The latter part
of the book focuses on what we can and can't do
with artificial intelligence. He is very much a
realist with the ability to admit what is working
and what is failing. His machines definitely
capture a spark, he notes, but they also fall
short.
He notes with some chagrin that his robot
lawnmower leaves behind tufts of uncut grass. Why?
It uses a subsumption-like algorithm that doesn't
bother creating a model of the yard. The robot
just bounces around until the battery runs out.
Eventually the laws of random chance mean that
every blade should be snipped, but the batteries
aren't strong enough to reach that point at
infinity. A model might help prevent random
lapses, but that still won't solve the problem.
Alas, the machines themselves are limited by the
lack of precision. One degree of error quickly
turns into several feet by the other end of the
yard. A robot wouldn't be able to follow a plan,
even if it could compute one.
What's missing, Brooks decides, is some secret
sauce he calls "the juice". Computation and AFSMs
may work with cockroaches, but we need something
more to get to the next level. Faster computers can do much more, but eventually we see through
the mechanism. Genghis looks cool, but learning
about the 57 AFSMs spoils the trick.
The standard criticism of Brooks' machines is that
they don't scale. There is no superglue juice that
can save a scaffolding built of toothpicks. The
AFSM may produce good cockroaches, but that's just
the beginning of the game. Humans are more than
that. Eventually, the AFSMs become too unwieldy to
be a stable programming paradigm. In fact, Brooks
sort of agrees with this premise when he suggests
that Genghis is his "most satisfying robot." It
was also one of the first. The later models with
more AFSMs just don't rank.
But humans and other living creatures don't scale
either. We may be able to run 20 miles per hour,
but only for 100 yards. We may be able to troll
for flames on five bulletin boards, but eventually
we get our pseudonyms confused. Limits are part of
life and we only survive by forgiving them. To
some extent, the lifelike qualities of his robots
are direct results of the self-imposed limits of
the AFSMs.
Your reaction to these machines will largely
depend upon how many of the limits you are willing
to forgive. Stern taskmasters may never be happy
with a so-called robot, but a relaxed fellow
traveller may ignore enough of the glitches to interface successfully. Some will see enough of
themselves to be happy with the whirring gizmos as
a portrait of human and others may never find what
they're looking for. That's just the nature of
portraits. For me, this book is an excellent
portrait of a research program and the collection
of questions it tried to answer. You may look in
the mirror and want something different, but it's
worth taking a look at these machines.
Slashdot Mirror
your stories are lame... almost as lame as the comment you love to add at their ends.
I think you are too old to be so childish and I sugest you hang yourself to a tree...
but of course, I'd have to explain to you what a tree is... and it's so hard that I don't even know from where to start.
OK, let's say you'd better unplug yourt computer and suck its power plug...
don't forget to make a video, of course !
hasta luego, minablos censor.
why doesn't the /. code-pissing man want to give me the possibility to browse comments at -1 ???
I don't consider the ones above as funny.
most of the time, these consist of lame me-too-er that get upmodded to "+5 inforsightful".
could also be nice to have anonymous cowards marked as one's foe.
and why did this story appear so laaaaaate with already 8 comments in it ?
there's a vagina port inside ???
should please most nerds, especially the one that are too lazy to find a wife...
the others would maybe prefer it to have an anus.
...a triangle that would be pink, for example... ;-)
if I had one, I'd have fun hacking it to send my parents the coordinates of some coca farm in Columbia.
or maybe some CIA opium fields in Afghanistan
between her legs, that is, you're right but it's better to call this "duvet".
Guess you, Americans, are not even allowed to stare at your female coworkers because
OK, so what where you complaining about ?
Thanks, Mister, you are a Fonzier than the Fonz !
are people slow or has /. crashed once again ?
Erst Post !
Thanks for taking the first post off the hands of lame ACs.
/. had not proven once more its instability so that I'd have join you...
I wish
I finally found my 3-times exploit...
AC ???
Adolf Chitroll ?
I hope it won't be the case as this story really looks trollish !!!
what the Hell ???
Are the others on strike ?
come on !
not at all, unless you don't want it to !
According to the IBM songbook :t ml
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/barryf/songbook.h
OUR I. B. M. SALESMEN
Tune: "Jingle Bells"
1. I. B. M., Happy men, smiling all the way.
Oh what fun it is to sell our products night and day.
I. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J.
In his service to mankind-that's why we are so gay.
2. I. B. M., Watson men, International line:
Proud T. M. - Dayton Scale - and I. T. R. so fine
I. B. M. goods and men, leaders all the time.
Saving money, time and men, in every land and clime.
Hey, that was nice !
But how the Hell did you manage to get above -5 ???
On /., one has to be either a moron or a troll and Katz wants to be published each time he has his period (on a weekly basis, that is).
It was not during last fall but during last summer, you should definitely proof-read your junk, bastard !
No problem, I won't land on your Moon anymore, I have loads of stuff to do on Earth at this moment, like giving your mum enough decent genes to bear a better a you
but yuk... what a slut !
You did not only submit a dupe story but also are boring me with your lame karma whoring...
Get a life instead of focussing on your second-hand balls !
Who cares ? :-)
At least we once more had the opportunity to race for "frisch spot"
Not at all.
The second is not computed as a 86400th of a day but rather as a multiple of the oscillation frequency of some particle.
I doubt these particles were oscillating a quicker way in these dark ages.
BTW, your nick desserves a "+1 Funny" whereas your post desserves a "-1 moronic".
Why would I play ball in space when I have the ability to troll on Slashdot ?
Peter Wayner writes: "A long time ago, I posed for a portrait at a church fair. The priest wandered by, paused for a second, and then caught up to me later. "Do you like the picture?" he asked. When I said it was fine, he told me, "Oh, I think its terrible. It doesn't look like you at all. But that doesn't matter. The artist is supposed to create a picture of what you think you look like." Read on to see what this has to do with robots as Peter reviews Rod Brook's new book.
In a way, robots are portraits of humans. Machines are just machines and assembly lines are just assembly lines. The buckets of bolts don't become robots until they start to take on some of the characteristics and a few of the jobs of humans. A drill for tightening a bolt may replace a biceps, but it's just a motor until it's on the end of a fancy mechanical arm that positions it automatically. Then it's a robot ready for a call from central casting.
Defining just what is and is not a robot is not an easy job for technologists because the replicants and androids are a touchstone and a benchmark for measuring our progress toward the future. It's 2002 and everyone is asking: Where's mad Hal steering a space craft to oblivion? Or more importantly: Why am I still vacuuming the floors and mowing the lawn by myself?
If you are asking these questions, then you might want to read the answers Rod Brooks, the director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, offers in his charming book, Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us. The book is half a thoughtful biography of the various robots created by his graduate students and half a philosophical explanation of what to expect from the gradual emergence of robot butlers.
The biographical part is probably the most enjoyable. He and his students have produced more than a dozen memorable robots who've crawled, rolled and paced their way around MIT. One searched for Coke cans to recycle, one tried to give tours to visitors, and another just tried to hold a conversation. Brooks spends time outlining how and why each machine can into being. The successes and more importantly the failures become the basis for creating a new benchmark for what machines can and can't do.
An ideal version of this book should include a DVD or a video cassette with pictures of the robots in action because the movement is surprisingly lifelike. Brooks is something of a celebrity because a film maker named Errol Morris made a droll, deadpan documentary that cut between four eccentric geniuses talking about their work. One guy sculpted topiary, one tamed lions, one studied naked mole rats, and the fourth was Rod Brooks, the man who made robots. Brooks minted the title for the film, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, a phrase he uses to describe his philosophy for creating robots. The movie tried to suss out the essence of genius, but it makes a perfect counterpoint for the book by providing some visual evidence of Brooks' success.
One of the stars of the movie was a six-legged robot called Genghis, a collection of high-torque RC airplane servo motors that Brooks feels is the best or most fully-realized embodiment of this fast and cheap approach. The robot marches along with a surprisingly life-like gait chasing after the right kind of radiation to tickle the IR and pyro-electric sensors mounted on whiskers. If you've seen the film, it's hard to forget his gait.
Brooks says that the secret to the success of Genghis is that there is no secret. The book's appendix provides an essential exploration of the design, which is short and very simple. The soul of the machine has 57 neuron-like subroutines, or "augmented finite state machines" in academic speak. For instance, one of the AFSMs responsible for balance constantly checks the force on a motor. If it is less than 7, the AFSM does nothing and if it is greater than 11, the AFSM reduces the force by three. That's doesn't seem like very much intelligence be it artificial or real, but 57 neuron-like subroutines like this are all it takes to create a fairly good imitation of a cockroach.
Brooks calls this a "subsumption architecture" and the book is most successful describing the days that he spent with his graduate students building robots and seeing what the architecture and a handful of AFSMs could do. He half mocks the roboticists who load up their machines with big computers trying to compute complex models of the world and all that is in it. In his eyes, the lumbering old-school machines just move a few inches and then devote a gazillion cycles to creating a detailed, digital description of every plant, brick or wayward child in the field of view. After a few more gazillion cycles, the machine chooses a path and moves a few more inches. Even when they find their way, time passes them by.
There are no complex control mechanisms sucking down cycles on the machines from Brooks' lab, the source of the claim that they're "out of control". It's just AFSMs wired together. One of the robots fakes human interaction by tracking fast motion and flesh colored pixels. Brooks marvels at how a few simple rules can produce a machine that is remarkably life-like. If you're not sure, they have video tapes of lab visitors holding conversations with the machine, who apparently takes part in the conversation with the patient interest of a well-bred host. As if by magic, the AFSMs are creating enough human-like movement and visitor in the tape begins treating the robot like a human!
If you're still not sure, you might buy a "My Real Baby" doll designed by Brooks with the help of the adept mechanical geniuses in Taiwan. The story of taking a highbrow concept from MIT to the local toy store is a great part of the book. The so-called toy is filled with AFSMs that tell it when to gurgle, when to pout, when to sleep, and when to demand sustenance. Alas, the toy makers tell Brooks that the market can't stomach so much innovation. One new thing at a time.
So are these machines truly successful simulacra? Are they infused with enough of the human condition to qualify as the science-fiction-grade robots or are they just cute parlor tricks? Some readers will probably point to the AFSMs and scoff. Seeing the code is like learning the secret to a magic trick.
Brooks, on the other hand, is sure that these machines are on the right track. In a sense, he makes it easier for his robots to catch up with humans by lowering the bar. On the back of the book, Brooks ladles out the schmaltz and proclaims, "We are machines, as are our spouses, our children and our dogs... I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines." That is, we're all just a slightly more involved collection of simple neurons that don't do much more than the balance mechanism of Genghis. You may think that you're deeply in love with the City of Florence, the ideal of democratic discourse, that raven-haired beauty three rows up, puppy dogs, or rainy nights cuddled under warm blankets, but according to the Brooks paradigm, you're just a bunch of AFSMs passing numbers back and forth.
If you think this extreme position means he's a few AFSMs short of a robot professor though, don't worry. Brooks backs away from this characterization when he takes on some of the bigger questions of what it means to be a human and what it means to be a machine. The latter part of the book focuses on what we can and can't do with artificial intelligence. He is very much a realist with the ability to admit what is working and what is failing. His machines definitely capture a spark, he notes, but they also fall short.
He notes with some chagrin that his robot lawnmower leaves behind tufts of uncut grass. Why? It uses a subsumption-like algorithm that doesn't bother creating a model of the yard. The robot just bounces around until the battery runs out. Eventually the laws of random chance mean that every blade should be snipped, but the batteries aren't strong enough to reach that point at infinity. A model might help prevent random lapses, but that still won't solve the problem. Alas, the machines themselves are limited by the lack of precision. One degree of error quickly turns into several feet by the other end of the yard. A robot wouldn't be able to follow a plan, even if it could compute one.
What's missing, Brooks decides, is some secret sauce he calls "the juice". Computation and AFSMs may work with cockroaches, but we need something more to get to the next level. Faster computers can do much more, but eventually we see through the mechanism. Genghis looks cool, but learning about the 57 AFSMs spoils the trick.
The standard criticism of Brooks' machines is that they don't scale. There is no superglue juice that can save a scaffolding built of toothpicks. The AFSM may produce good cockroaches, but that's just the beginning of the game. Humans are more than that. Eventually, the AFSMs become too unwieldy to be a stable programming paradigm. In fact, Brooks sort of agrees with this premise when he suggests that Genghis is his "most satisfying robot." It was also one of the first. The later models with more AFSMs just don't rank.
But humans and other living creatures don't scale either. We may be able to run 20 miles per hour, but only for 100 yards. We may be able to troll for flames on five bulletin boards, but eventually we get our pseudonyms confused. Limits are part of life and we only survive by forgiving them. To some extent, the lifelike qualities of his robots are direct results of the self-imposed limits of the AFSMs.
Your reaction to these machines will largely depend upon how many of the limits you are willing to forgive. Stern taskmasters may never be happy with a so-called robot, but a relaxed fellow traveller may ignore enough of the glitches to interface successfully. Some will see enough of themselves to be happy with the whirring gizmos as a portrait of human and others may never find what they're looking for. That's just the nature of portraits. For me, this book is an excellent portrait of a research program and the collection of questions it tried to answer. You may look in the mirror and want something different, but it's worth taking a look at these machines.
Peter Wayner is the author of two books appearing this spring: the second edition of Disappearing Cryptography , a book about steganography, and Translucent Databases , a book about adding extra security to databases. You can purchase Flesh and Machines from Barnes & Noble. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.