Thursday, August 18, 2011

Mythbusters robot rant

I really want to take exception with Grant from Mythbusters "robots".  I would contest that at best they are mechanisms or devices.  They are specifically intended to be deterministic, repeatable (usually) and very predictable.  Just because they are often remote control or include fun actuators, do not, in my book, a robot make.  I can't remember ever seeing any of them being driven by sensor arrays.

My definitions are:

A Tool: A thing that focuses the energy of the user for a specific task.
A device: Something that harnesses an energy source for a specific task. (Superset of a tool)
A basic robot:  Something that has sensors, actuators and a means of making a decision based on the sensor input as to whether to drive the actuators or not.
Artificial inteligence: A system, that given the same inputs, has the ability to modify (or learn) its response based on evaluation of the responses against a constant critieria. (Goodness, happiness, pleasure, task success etc)

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