
The Roomba’s Ancestor: The Cybernetic Tortoise - sohkamyung
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/meet-roombas-ancestor-cybernetic-tortoise
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drallison
Not sure how these robot experiments are related to the cybernetic tortoises.

The Johns Hopkins Beast
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Beast))
held an almost mythological sway over my imagination when I learned of it in
the early 1960's. Lee Hoevel, then a graduate student of Mike Flynn, spoke
affectionately of the beast and the noises it made in its nocturnal foraging
for electric power sockets on the 2nd floor of the lab where he began his
graduate work.

Digging into the pre-history of another experience turned up the following
story. Thanks to Bruce Koball who was there.

Briefly, in 1987, Key Dewdney attended the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. In
conversations with John Wharton and Bruce Koball, he challenged them to come
up with a realization of Valentino Braitenberg's thought experiment as
described in his monograph "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology"
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles).
The prize was entry to the exclusive First Conference on Artificial Life to be
held that fall Los Alamos National Labs.
[http://alife.org/conference/alife-1](http://alife.org/conference/alife-1)
John and Bruce took up his challenge; Bruce built the h/w (using a gutted
radio-controlled model car) and John wrote the firmware. As a "front-end" we
used a simple neural net simulation program written for Macintosh called
"MacBrain" that Bruce had been experimenting with. It had a nifty GUI which
allowed him to define neural net topologies on-screen and then download the
net into the vehicle via an async serial port where it was executed in John's
code. Their vehicle debuted at A-Life 1 in 1987, and then was shown again at
the annual AMW (the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop) and in Stanford's iconic
Colloquium, EE380. Then, at Fred Coury's urging, Bruce wrote a brief paper, "A
Test Vehicle for Braitenberg Control Structures", on our efforts for COMPCON
Spring 1988.
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3496636_A_test_vehi...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3496636_A_test_vehicle_for_Braitenberg_control_structures)
[Bruce R. Koball, Motion West, Berkeley; bkoball@well.com,
bkoball@motionwest.com]

I, Dennis Allison, was an observer and not a participant in both these
anecdotes. It was inspiring to see Bratenburg vehicles
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle)),
designed as a thought experiment, actually demonstrate very complex behaviors
even though the control program used a very simple rule set. John released
several vehicles during the RATS session at the annual Asilomar Microcomputer
Workshop where they scurried about under tables and chairs. Some hid, others
vamped. They were an immediate hit, a showstopper with an audience of jaded
techies. It took a while to find them all as some went into deep hiding mode.
Later, John repeated the release as part of an EE380 Colloquium talk at
Stanford, but Terman Auditorium lacked the hiding spaces Asilomar provided.

