A-I through A-Brains?

[JBeukema]

Neurobotics is an outgrowth of a growing realization that, when it comes to understanding the brain, neither computer simulations nor top-down robotic models are getting anywhere close. As Dartmouth neuroscientist and Director of the Brain Engineering Lab Richard Granger puts it, “The history of top-down-only approaches is spectacular failure. We learned a ton, but mainly we learned these approaches don’t work.”
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The robots in Jeff Krichmar’s lab don’t look like much. CARL-1, his latest model, is a squat, white trash can contraption with a couple of shopping cart wheels bolted to its side, a video camera wired to the lid, and a couple of bunny ears taped on for good measure. But open up that lid and you’ll find something remarkable — the beginnings of a truly biological nervous system. CARL-1 has thousands of neurons and millions of synapses that, he says, “are just about the edge of the amount of size and complexity found in real brains.” Not surprisingly, robots built this way — using the same operating principles as our nervous system — are called neurobots. Krichmar emphasizes that these artificial nervous systems are based upon neurobiological principles rather than computer models of how intelligence works. The first of those principles, as he describes it, is: “The brain is embodied in the body and the body is embedded in the environment — so we build brains and then we put these brains in bodies and then we let these bodies loose in an environment to see what happens,” This has become something of a foundational principle — and the great and complex challenge — of neurobotics.
When you embed a brain in a body, you get behavior not often found in other robots. Brain bots don’t work like Aibo. You can buy a thousand different Aibos and they all behave the same. But brain bots, like real brains, learn through trial and error, and that changes things. “Put a couple of my robots inside a maze,” says Krichmar, “let them run it a few times, and what each of those robots learns will be different. Those differences are magnified into behavior pretty quickly.” When psychologists define personality, it’s along the lines of “idiosyncratic behavior that’s predictive of future behavior.” What Krichmar is saying is that his brain bots are developing personalities — and they’re doing it pretty quickly.

Here Come the Neurobots | h+ Magazine

 

[editec]

One can create programs which do amazingly (and surprisingly) complex behaviors with fairly simply programs.

If we are going to create AI programs, I suspect that we're not going to do it by creating very complex programs, but by creating simple programs with basic rules which interact in a complex envirnment in complex behaviors.



The rules of living that a cockroach follows are fairly simple, for example, yet the species is enormously successful nevertheless.