From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utgpu!utcsri!rutgers!att!linac!convex!constellation!hardy.math.okstate.edu!gindrup Tue Jun 23 13:20:57 EDT 1992
Article 6285 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utgpu!utcsri!rutgers!att!linac!convex!constellation!hardy.math.okstate.edu!gindrup
>From: gindrup@math.okstate.edu (Eric Gindrup)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Frogs vs. Robots (was Re: Transducers)
Message-ID: <1992Jun17.163333.2417@math.okstate.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 92 16:33:33 GMT
References: <YAMAUCHI.92Jun17004033@heron.cs.rochester.edu>
Organization: Oklahoma State University, Math Department
Lines: 27

In article <YAMAUCHI.92Jun17004033@heron.cs.rochester.edu> yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) writes:
>
>Well for one thing, you can drop a frog in a pond, and there's a good
>chance it will survive for quite a long time (years?  what is the
>lifespan of a frog anyway?) without any human intervention whatsoever.
>
>The same is not true about any mobile robot system currently in
>existence -- even in an artificial environment with all of the
>necessary resources (i.e. a building with recharger outlets).  At
>least, I haven't heard of any mobile robot which can operate without
>human intervention for a period of a month, much less multiple
>years...
>--
>Brian Yamauchi				Robotics Applications Development
>yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu		Kennedy Space Center

Assumption: There is more to a frog than just the apparatus necessary
for thinking.
     If so, then dropping only those parts of a frog which are "doing the
thinking" into a pond will probably be no more viable than placing a
machine which is a purely thinking apparatus into "an environment."
I.e. not much.  So one might say that this distinction lies mostly in
hardware and programming (and teaching and learning and all the other
things which go bump in the mind...) which, once we assume a machine as
intelligent as a frog, we ought to be able to assume as well.

-- Eric Gindrup ! gindrup@math.okstate.edu


