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From: marty@indirect.com (Marty Stoneman)
Subject: Re: Can "HAL" become a reality?
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Date: Mon, 8 May 1995 17:43:39 GMT
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Patrick C. Beard (beard@cs.ucdavis.edu) wrote: : In article
<3o9vmq$jki@news.csus.edu> MICHAEL BRUNO MOTTA, mocha@sfsu.edu writes: :
>Is it possible to build a computer that would be based on actual :
>biological and electronic components?  In other words, is it possible to
: >create a living computer, like "HAL" in 2001? 

: My memory might be fuzzy, but I don't believe HAL was biological in any
sense. : The main component that was supposed to make HAL possible was
"holographic" memory, : which I assume was meant to be the ultimate in
associative memory. 

: I would argue that if we could figure out how to use biological
components to, : as you put it, "add emotion" to computation, then we
could easily substitute : non-biological components and get the same
result. 

	Yes, I totally agree! 

: Now, whether HAL-like systems will ever exist, I too believe they will,
although, : probably not in our lifetimes. I hope to be proven wrong on
this count. 

	I, also, hope you are proven wrong.  And some of the answers may
not come from academia!  I worked on a wildly-creative privately-funded
cognitive-systems multi-year project in the '80's (called "Anthrobotics")
which, among other things, showed the feasibility of incorporating
emotions into robots (including emotional effects on the robot's facial
muscles for "readability").  This feasibility study got quite a lot of
real-time behaviors using simulated parallel processing on a 286 chip. 
The project never got mainstream funding, I believe primarily because we
could find no reputable academician who could understand our new approach. 

					Marty Stoneman
					marty@indirect.com
