robotresearcher

Neat, thanks. I should have thought of that.

Two DOF: two sensors?

It’s very odd that Braitenberg didn’t cite Walter’s precedent in ‘Vehicles’. He very likely knew about Walter, Ashby’s homeostat, etc, and used the cybernetics terminology in some of his work.

Fun historical note: the linked newsreel film was known about but unseen for a long time, then found by Owen Holland in the BBC Bristol archive around 1999. Either Owen or I sent it to Rod, to great enjoyment.

Film includes operator-moves-trashcan-with-foot, a staple of mobile robot clips ever since.

Thanks! And probably the earth relative velocity depends on the time of year :)

No, intelligence is a description of behavior, not stuff.

As a crisp example: a newly dead person is almost exactly the same stuff as an alive person, but has no intelligence at all. Not a little less, as the difference in stuff would suggest.

For clarity, it’s still proportional to 1/r², but with a much larger multiplier than one.

> the spacecraft, in flight since 1977, is cruising at nearly 38,000 mph (61,000 kph) through the vacuum of space,

The page takes great pains to explain things, but omits a frame of reference for this speed. I’m guessing it’s sun-relative, but it could be relative to its take-off on Earth. Does anyone know?

Thatcher was a scientist, but no more an academic than most politicians.

She had a honors bachelors degree. An Oxford MA is awarded three years later on application, and is not an earned master’s degree. Unusually for a politician, it was a science degree (chemistry), and she worked in a lab at school and after school briefly, but she got a law degree later, which is a typical politician thing.

If that bachelor’s degree was in humanities, like almost all elected officials, no one would refer to her as an academic.

In contrast, Merkel earned a PhD, and some of these newly elected Serbian reps are long-time professors.

The parent did not make either of these mistakes.

> It's not just predicting content but also the form/shape of the response

Nicely done.