thought experiment
sciencepunk | April 5, 2011What games would a robot play? It's a question that struck me last night, and kept me up as I sketched out diagrams for android puzzle toys.
For a start, we have to imagine why a robot would play games. We're not even able to explain why we enjoy them so much. To say that games trigger the reward system in the brain doesn't add anything by way of an explanation. Enjoyment, pleasure, is an atomic building block of behaviour, it's impossible to break it down any further. So why ask why robots would play games when we can't explain our own fascination with them? They just do. We can give…
cevans | December 15, 2008
Let's try a thought experiment.
This one comes via Buckminster Fuller: imagine you have a length of nylon rope, which you splice into a length of cotton rope, then into another length of hemp rope. If you tie an overhand knot in the rope, and push it down, through all three kinds of ropes, the knot remains a knot. The material is irrelevant, because the knot is just a pattern that has a specific set of guidelines for itself. Fuller wrote that "a pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists." That is to say, if you…