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Gel speakers in the news: Rodney Brooks and Erin McKean
Jul 29, 2007
The robotics work of Rodney Brooks, Gel speaker Gel '04, is in this NYT story today about robots. Notice his innovation of not following the lemmings:
Each time he faced a problem in artificial intelligence, he said, he looked for the implicit assumption that everyone else took for granted, and then he tried to negate it. In the 1980s, the implicit assumption was that abstract reasoning was the highest form of intelligence, the one that programmers should strive to imitate. This led to a focus on symbolic processing, on tough tasks like playing chess or solving problems in algebra or calculus. Tasks that, as Brooks slyly put it in "Flesh and Machines," "highly educated male scientists found challenging."
But Brooks wanted to build an artificial intelligence system that did the supposedly simple things, not mental acrobatics like chess but things that come naturally to any 4-year-old and that were eluding the symbolic processing capabilities of the computers. ...
Separately, in the same NYT magazine issue, Erin McKean :'06: writes about the OEC:
[I]f you look at the word spork in the Oxford English Corpus, a 1.8-billion-word database of written and spoken English, and see how people actually write and talk about sporks, you find that 24 percent of the uses of the word spork involve violence. (In fact, some of the most common things to be sporked, far ahead of coleslaw, are eyeballs.)
