

U. of Arizona student builds Ubuntu-Atom powered spider-bot - viraptor
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/13107-u-of-arizona-student-builds-ubuntu-atom-powered-spider-bot/

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SlyShy
I think this is finally the right direction for AI to move in. For a while it
has seemed like AI researchers were too enamored with the idea that humans
were inborn with certain ideas like language and motor capability, and that
they should try to replicate that inbuiltness in a machine.

My take is that humans are born with little more than sensory perception, and
a mechanism for recognizing patterns and cause and effect (this is known as
memory).

If you observe the actions of young children closely, I think you'll find that
they are consistent with the actions of someone trying to conduct experiments
in the world beginning with very little information.

When my younger siblings were babies they would do the old routine of "holding
my hands up around my face and waving them around." I think this is the
process of forming the deduction "when I fire my motor neurons something
appears in my sight." And eventually this association becomes so strong that
the child recognizes the hand as something he directly controls, i.e. the
self.

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cabalamat
> _I think this is finally the right direction for AI to move in._

I think it is a right direction for AI to move in, but certainly not the only
one.

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mark_l_watson
Very cool idea of using a low cost camera sensor to provide feedback on how
well the robot is moving. I would guess (not having seen the code) that Matt
is using the metric of how far the robot can move to tune parameters for
controlling the legs (genetic algorithm or genetic programming).

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blhack
Isn't it a bit incorrect (or at least irrelevant) to say that the robot is
running Ubuntu?

Maybe things have changed drastically in the last few years, but the last time
I checked, Ubuntu was a pretty installer and package manager for gnu/linux.

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wendroid
> The software runs off of a Ubuntu Linux OS

Besides, one should say "on Ubuntu" not "off of".

