Check out the His Dark Materials trilogy...really amazing characters, really cool plot...lots of references to older literature too, if you like looking for them (the title of the trilogy is, after all, taken from Milton's Paradise Lost).
I'm a Brown ugrad who saw the walker demoed...the cool thing about it was not that it walked, but that it started with no knowledge of how to walk (ie used random movements) and over a series of attempts learned which sequence maximized distance travelled per step. (Obviously there were some constraints placed on the movements so that it couldn't fall over or break itself.)
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Check out the His Dark Materials trilogy...really amazing characters, really cool plot...lots of references to older literature too, if you like looking for them (the title of the trilogy is, after all, taken from Milton's Paradise Lost).
I'm a Brown ugrad who saw the walker demoed...the cool thing about it was not that it walked, but that it started with no knowledge of how to walk (ie used random movements) and over a series of attempts learned which sequence maximized distance travelled per step. (Obviously there were some constraints placed on the movements so that it couldn't fall over or break itself.)