Re: Protean Self-Transformation

Gregory Houston (vertigo@triberian.com)
Mon, 31 Mar 1997 01:13:25 -0600


David McFadzean wrote:

> What if the images that the computer analyses were generated with
> a ray-tracing program? No optical hardware needed.

That would be much more like imagination than seeing. I do not require
eyes to see things in my head that I make up, but if I want to see
things from the real world then I need something that will recieve
information from the real world.

> Randall Beer and his students successfully taught (programmed/trained/
> evolved) a simulated cockroach to walk though it had no real (hardware)
> legs. When the neural nets were later downloaded into a real robot it
> could instantly walk in the real world.

It was trained to walk, but it could not walk until it had the robot
embodiment. It could think about walking all day long, but until the
instructions were downloaded into the hardware (the robot) there was no
walking going on.

-- 
Gregory Houston                 Triberian Institute of Emotive Education
vertigo@triberian.com           http://www.triberian.com 
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