From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,915d37e7b8e0ec69 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: "Steve Whalen" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: and visual library once again Date: 25 Oct 2005 00:23:18 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1130224998.944468.133100@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> References: <1129861178.782874.87870@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1129888684.681335.230450@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1130049078.633311.55000@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.238.135.165 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1130225005 11180 127.0.0.1 (25 Oct 2005 07:23:25 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 07:23:25 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: G2/0.2 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com; posting-host=68.238.135.165; posting-account=GBMmzA0AAABrZ0dHOASa3b2Cdf-RliH9 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:5916 Date: 2005-10-25T00:23:18-07:00 List-Id: Bob Spooner wrote: > "Steve Whalen" wrote in message > news:1130049078.633311.55000@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... > > > > Much the way the DARPA > > challenge of having an autonomous vehicle drive itself over 100 miles > > through rough desert terrain was solved: not by elegant software, but > > by practical engineering and brute force computing. In the time-frames > > I was referring to (50 to 100 years from now), the power of today's > > most powerful weather simulation super computers will fit inside a > > hollowed out grain of sand. > > > I think you would be surprised at the elegance of some of the artificial > intelligence techniques that are used. Where I work, we do research on and > with autonomous vehicles. The brute force approach simply doesn't work. > > Bob I'm sorry. I didn't mean to denigrate or downplay the work being done in the field (or the work that was done for the DARPA challenge). I'm not at all surprised that there is some very elegant work in AI being done for autonomous vehicles. Doing the kind of hard work you do was considered unnecessary and "brute force" by many AI pundits of the 1960's who were going to (within 10 years!) emulate the human brain in a computer and then just have the computer brain learn do any task a human could do. Marvin Minsky's book I referred to was basically saying that was b.s. and wasn't going to happen (which I agree with, then and now). About every 10 years or so someone from the AI community says something similar... That's the crowd I was thinking of, to whom anything other than putting a human brain in a computer and letting it figure out how do something, is "brute force"(I'm oversimplifying again: it was quite a battle for $$ and research grants and reputation and ego: thankfully that never happens any more ). We may get closer to being able to emulate a human brain in a hardware computer in 100 years, but I suspect that most if not all of the "useful" AI work that will power the robots and such I was talking about, will come from the kind of work you do. I still think we should continue to learn from the brain, but I think trying to program a hardware computer to emulate how a human brain works isn't going to magically make a "smart" computer. I just hope Ada (or it's successor) is still around in an hundred years and being used for the more critical components of the robots we entrust our life to. Ironically the last time I did any serious robotics about 10+ years ago, Forth was my language of choice for the task at hand due to memory and hardware constraints. I guess that's a part of the point I was trying to make: "hardware constraints" are beginning to disappear, and will have disappeared completely in 100 years. Steve