Meditations of the Machine

Tasks that seem to like second nature to us are often extraordinarily difficult to replicate in robotics. Honda has been working for decades to make it’s Asimo capable of walking upstairs, and even with rigorous programming in a controlled environment the results have sometimes been disappointing.

Other non-humanoid attempts have had more success with locomotion over varied surfaces. One famous example is Rodney Brooks’s Genghis, which uses augmented finite state machines (AFSMs), simple programs that react to simple states in conjunction to accomplish complex tasks like walking.

Early in 2008, Boston Dynamics released the now famous video of its robot walker, Big Dog. Given the difficulties of making a machine walk on any surface with the acuity of a mammal, their work is quite impressive.

Keep in mind that it takes a human being months of diligent effort and experimentation to get this “simple” task down pat, and some people never really get it right. For my money, though, this effort by Seedwell is one of the best – and definitely the funniest.

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The inventor of the word “robotics,” Isaac Asimov wrote hundreds of stories, books, and essays that have had an enormous influence on robotics and artificial intelligence, both in fiction and in real life. Numerous sources cite the original “Three Laws,” which were first explicitly stated in Asimov’s 1949 short story “Runaround.”

Fewer readers, perhaps, are familiar with Asimov’s Zeroth Law, which he added later. This law – “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm” – is the implicit basis of the film version of I, Robot.

Next to no one, however, is aware that the great master of science fiction and futurist thought wrote a total of 30 Laws.

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