Isotropic is …
... my personal blog. Anything I write here is simply my personal, probably ill-formed, opinion and does not represent the views, beliefs, positions, or opinions of any other person or entity.
Tag Archives: artificial intelligence
15 Aug 2009
The Face of SkyNet?
What is evil and how do you formally define it? That’s what Selmer Bringsjord of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Cognitive Science has been working on. He and his team created “E”, a computer representation with some degree of artificial intelligence, loaded it with some scenarios, and then asked it questions to determine why it […]
07 Mar 2009
Ghosts of Memory
In the small hours of the morning, as I wander randomly over the ‘Net, something reminds me of Ghost in the Shell. One of the pervasive issues in GITS is what it means to be human in a society where entire bodies can be replaced with prosthetics, consciousness transferred from one construct to another, and […]
29 Nov 2008
Fun With Your New Head
Live demonstrations at ICT 2008 will include several robotic heads that show facial emotional responses to humans’ faces and voices. Of course, the first thing I thought of was Thomas M. Disch’s Fun With Your New Head. If I remember correctly, it was a user manual of sorts for bodyless human heads that were sold […]
01 Jun 2008
Day of the Squishy Things
I’m always inordinately delighted by interesting phrases (Ooh, shiny!). So much so that I’ll make a post just so I can reference the phrases. That isn’t to say that the posts I link to aren’t interesting in themselves — I didn’t find them while actually looking for quotes, after all. I’m just sayin’. I’ll try […]
22 Mar 2008
BigDog Quadruped Robot
BigDog is a quadruped robot being developed by Boston Dynamics (funded by DARPA). You can read more about BigDog at Think Artificial. BigDog’s behavior is fascinating, eerie, creepy — there’s a certain dissonance, knowing that it’s just a machine, yet its behavior induces that reptile-brain gut feeling that this is a living, very alien, creature. […]
13 Mar 2008
Swarming Robots
I want. Please send me a set, lol. The main focus of this project is to investigate and develop novel principles of adaptation and evolution for symbiotic multi-robot organisms based on bio-inspired approaches and modern computing paradigms. Such robot organisms consist of super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share […]
