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THOUGHTFUL ROBOTS 99

fields have been successfully used in creating the advanced computer
applications we use today.
In the article, Brooks asked why neither AI nor AL has yet
succeeded in creating something that the average person would
consider to be a living thing. In the early days of AI, it was easy
to suggest that computers were simply not powerful enough to
do the necessary calculations—and might never be. On the other
hand, the well-accepted observation known as Moore’s Law states
that computer power doubles every 18 months to two years. This
has held true: Brooks pointed out that the 1965 chess program
MacHack could process only a few thousand game positions a sec-
ond, while the Deep Blue program that defeated world champion
Garry Kasparov in 1997 could churn through 200 million moves
in that same time.
This raw power has fueled important advances, including vision
systems that can much more quickly identify and analyze features
in the environment, as with automatically driven vehicles on Earth
and rovers on Mars.
In recent years, Brooks has turned his attention to what research-
ers have been unable to accomplish, despite ever-increasing com-
putational power. The complex way in which the many “layers” of
functioning that comprise living behavior emerge from molecular
structures and processes has continued to resist modeling. In his
Nature article, Brooks suggested several possibilities:

(1) We might be just getting a few parameters wrong; (2) we might
be building models that are below some complexity threshold; (3)
perhaps there is still a lack of computing power; and (4) we might
be missing something fundamental and currently unimagined in our
models of biology.

Brooks has not given up on the quest. He is trying to identify what
the “hard” parts of biology—those that do not fit mathematical
models very well—might have in common. He is also looking at “dis-
tributed systems” where many cooperating systems work together to
form a functional whole. This idea has become very important in the
design of computer-operating systems and networks. It is also, after