
Claude Shannon demonstrates Theseus, a magnetic maze-solving mouse [video] - mr_tyzic
http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2010/3/16/In-Their-Own-Words-Claude-Shannon-Demonstrates-Machine-Learning
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nickgrosvenor
He's a legend. For further reading on Claude Shannon check out the following
books.

Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone
([http://goo.gl/VrBMUW](http://goo.gl/VrBMUW))

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick
([http://goo.gl/Q5tzCW](http://goo.gl/Q5tzCW))

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iandanforth
I also heartily recommend The Information. Such a great book, such a terrible
title.

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chockablock
Also some wonderful color on Shannon's early life, career at Bell Labs and in
academia in The Idea Factory (a fantastic read for any Hacker News reader).

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dalek2point3
very cool.

check this out for a modern example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExW_rxKdNJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExW_rxKdNJE)

For those interested -- people are still interested in building maze solving
robots, still called "micromouse". Here is one amazin micromouse that can
traverse a maze and remember the solution very, very quickly. These days, its
as much a mechanical problem (i.e. building a mouse that is robust, and has
accurate sensors) as it is algorithmic.

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codezero
Do you know the rules of the micromouse races? In all the videos I see, the
mouse appears to go directly from start to finish without any maze finding
going on.

My best guess is that they get earlier runs to "learn" the maze, then go for a
speed run, is that right?

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fryguy
Yes, there is a learning phase and a timed run.

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codezero
I am guessing the learning phase plays into the score somehow, otherwise they
may as well be pre-programmed, right? It seems unlikely there are mice that
would be unable to figure out the mazes at this point.

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artursapek
It looks like there's something of an art to how they handle corners and
diagonals. At sub 10 second run times I think the agility is really the hard
part of the programming, not the actual maze solving algorithm.

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iandanforth
I wish he were alive and working today. The fact that Alzheimer's prevented
him from seeing the increasingly amazing results of his life's work is one of
history's small but powerful tragedies.

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glhaynes
Fantastic video. Even just the sound of Theseus's operation is fun to hear.

 _" This is a bank of relays: telephone relays."_

On a tangential note: just the other day I was having a conversation with a
friend who felt that "phone" was an inaccurate and perhaps inappropriately
diminutive term for the pocket computers that so many people carry now. I
argued contrarily from a language-evolution standpoint, but if I were to find
myself in a similar discussion again I think I might instead point toward what
a tremendous role telephone systems and the people like Shannon who built them
played in the development of what we now call computers. Smartphones are
descendants of telephones but they're equally descendants of telephone
_systems_.

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_quasimodo
For people without flashplayer:

    
    
      rtmpdump -r 'rtmp://cp262207.edgefcs.net/ondemand/techchannel/10385/videos/OW10002.Claude_Shannon-FL8_550x310_700K' -o Claude_Shannon_Demonstrates_Machine_Learning.flv

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sp332
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPKkXibQXGA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPKkXibQXGA)
I made sure it plays without Flash.

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imrehg
I remember reading about this and his work at Bell in The Idea Factory
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-
factory](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factory) It's
awesome and strange in the same time.

He was basically fooling around "instead of work", creating such amazing
things, while all the more people fooling around "instead of work" I see these
days are at max creating high scores for Candy Crush...

Lot to learn. :)

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zenbowman
The Idea Factory is a great book, it totally shatters the myths so often
propagated today.

It demonstrates without doubt that innovation can happen at a very large scale
in very large, monopolistic, noncompetitive organizations. In fact, there's
reason to believe that innovation might require a very large organization,
because small companies don't have the funds needed to do research, and are
likely to be unable to capture the market even if their research does bear
fruit.

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gioele
> innovation might require a very large organization,

Like, you know, nations?

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thret
"We must beware of invalid 'implications' in the discussion of nervous
systems, brains and machinery. Are there men who would deny the meaning of
ethics, of aesthetics, of religion, on the strength of a mechanical tortoise?
Absurdly enough, there are." \- Stafford Beer, 'Cybernetics and Management'
1959.

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Ecio78
I'm the only one that reading Theseus thought about this:
[http://continuum.wikia.com/wiki/Julian_Randol](http://continuum.wikia.com/wiki/Julian_Randol)
?

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tripzilch
It crossed my mind yes, but the robotic mouse and the TV character were named
after the Greek myth for different reasons:

1) Theseus escaped from the Minotaur's Labyrinth, hence a maze-running robot.

2) First paragraph of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus)
says:

"""Theseus was a founder-hero, like Perseus, Cadmus, or Heracles, all of whom
battled and overcame foes that were identified with an archaic religious and
social order.[2] As Heracles was the Dorian hero, Theseus was a founding hero,
considered by Athenians as their own great reformer (...)"""

Which meshes nicely with the _Continuum_ character. Possibly for even more
reasons, but I'm not super familiar with the Greek Theseus myth.

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jonstewart
This is fantastic. Why hasn't this been posted before?

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yzzxy
Must have been a tough choice between Theseus and Algernon.

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jonstewart
This was 8–9 years before Flowers for Algernon was published.

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opinali
Old datacenter & cabling porn, too :)

