Page 36 - Anatomy of a Robot

02_200256_CH02/Bergren 4/17/03 11:23 AM Page 21
CONTROL SYSTEMS 21
The truth is, the human brain is capable of massive calculations, far more than the
average huge computer. If you doubt this, consider the game of chess, in which
humans have been beating computers for years. Computers designed for chess are
only now catching up. But remember, chess is a game that a computer can at least
digest easily, so the designers can optimize the computations. Most of life is much
more complex than chess.
At the risk of throwing cold water on the dreams of creative young scientists, most
acts of human interaction will probably never even be defined, much less equaled
by machine. Wisdom, love, and compassion spring to mind.
The human mind has profound defects, defects that are manifest in the daily news
broadcast. One could argue from an evolutionary standpoint that human defects
such as those engendering greed and war are inevitable. Further, it could be argued
these defects still benefit the human species and help to propagate it. It might be
controversial to say so, but if we were to breed such traits out of humans, the
insects would probably supplant us sooner than we might expect. As a side exer-
cise, I ask you this. If you could press a button and make aggression, greed, envy,
and other such vices instantly disappear from the human race, would you really
press the button? If you could choose such traits for your robot, would you build
them in?
Humans cannot know their own minds, much less duplicate them perfectly. It
won’t stop us from trying though.
As a counterargument to my previous assertion, it must be stated that humans
are having an increasingly difficult time distinguishing between human and
computer “personalities.” Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician famous
for his code-breaking work in World War II, proposed a simple experiment that
has turned into a periodic contest. The experiment, known as the Turing Test,
challenges a human interrogator to hold a conversation with two unseen enti-
ties, one a computer and one a human. The interrogator must discover which is
which. Winners are awarded the Loebner Prize. Visit the Loebner Prize web site
for some interesting discussion and surprising results (www.loebner.net/Prizef/
loebner-prize.html). More on Turing can be found at http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/
asaygin/tt/ttest.html#intro.
As another example of problems that cannot, and perhaps should not, be solved,
consider whether your robot should be male, female, or genderless. We leave
this exercise to the student body and recommend the debate be taken outside
the classroom. A variant of the Turing Test, by the way, asks the interrogator to
differentiate between a man and a woman. What questions would you ask?
Humans cannot communicate with each other perfectly. A person can only attempt
to utter the right words that will instill the proper notion of his or her idea into