The Robot that Taught Itself to Limp!

Alan Turing in his famous (1950) paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence asserted: 'Specify the way in which you think a man is superior to a computer and I will build a computer which refutes your belief.'


The Robot (above|) built by John Bongard and a team of engineers at Cornell University at Ithaca, New York attest to Turing's presience. For the robots can sense and respond to damage without human instruction  Dismantle/pluck off  one of its legs and the robot responds by teaching itself to limp.


This might cause us to reflect on Karl Popper's assertion that it is not the self the uses the brain, it is the brain that uses a self model.


I can hear you getting irritated by this trespassing by 'Robots' into the terra incognita of our deepest selves. A violation isn't it, a desacralisation of the sacred institution our 'self'.


Let us return to the Robot. Even though it's pretty much all legs, the Robot doesn't know at first that it can walk. Rather, it's been programmed to figure that out on its own, starting with only the knowledge of what its parts are, but not how to use them.


Through a 16-step process of trial and error, it builds computer models of how its parts might be arranged and how best to move them. The machine does not have a single model of itself - it has many, simultaneous, competing, different, candidate models. The models compete over which can best explain the past experiences of the robot. Just like us then?


Well a definition of Consciousness (that still undiscovered country) is the appearance of a world. Every conscious system needs a unified inner representation of the world and that the information generated by this representation must be simultaneously available from a multitude of processing mechanisms. That is just how the Robot learns to limp


But I hear you ask a tad disconcerted does the Robot have a sense of being someone; you know, like us. Does it have a sense we have now as we read this; does it have a sense of being there, of doing this now?


I don't know, you will have to ask the Robot.