It has been a while...

[saintjudas]

It has been quite a while since I have posted anything...

Well, I figured that I would start off with something of substance again.

Today I went to the The Singularity Summit at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco... I met several bloggers, who I will post links to their sights tomorrow (or you can just look in the Sing. Summit's web-site

Comments

[jordan179]

All I have to go in is "That guy who talks about robotic toes all the time... Well, when I have my army of Robotic Supermen who have workable major and minor toe systems, that keep them from being a push-over (in the very real sense of the word)...

You can see the importance of properly flexing toes if you look at any of the 1950's - 60's attempts to build walker machines. Or if you pay attention to how you walk yourself -- notice how your toes automatically curl, even if you're wearing shoes, to improve your balance and traction, especially on an uneven surface?

Yeah, you need good toes, otherwise you might as well be tooling along in a Dalek Travel Machine -- and you know how poorly those handle the stairs :)

Yeah... I am painfully aware of the importance of toes...

[saintjudas]

It is sort of like those ol toy robots, where they either had those bits sticking out between the feet that would intertwine/pass over each other as each foot moved forward, or they would just have wheels on the bottom of the robot... More modern robots and prosthetics are beginning to more accurately model the foot and leg... Most of the problem, I have discovered over the summer, comes from the ankle joint and it relationship to how we move the toes.

BTW, I just had to gloat to someone... I just got TWO email responses from Ray Kurzweil about Urban Myths around the accelerating technology of the Singularity. It is a small project that I have been working on since the Second Singularity Summit this past weekend. I got the idea from some guy who talked about Artificial Intelligence as a sort of God that people would worship in the future...

Re: Yeah... I am painfully aware of the importance of toes...

[jordan179]

I was reading something about using computer models of strides in dinosaurs and hominids

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/was-ability-run-early-mans-achilles-heel-14175.html

and it struck me that the best way to control the (many) muscles in a walker robot or cyborg attachment might be the same way ... use a genetic algorithim that tries various firing sequences until it finds ones that avoid falling down. This is basically how a baby learns to toddle, walk and finally run, with the Darwinian winnowing being the pruning of excess neural chains.

If the walker is big enough that falling down would cause signficant damage, the practice could be done in a simulated environment, and then refined in the real world. This is basically like the toddler being (a) small enough that it doesn't really hurt itself when it falls down, and (b) having Mommy around to pick it up.

Hope your feet are doing ok.

Re: Yeah... I am painfully aware of the importance of toes...

[saintjudas]

That is basically how the training is done, but it is still a pretty heavy piece of coding. The principle is pretty staightforward, but the application is heavy and cumbersome...

Goertzel at Novamente Is using simulated environments to do just that (teach baby robots how to grow up into big adult robots, that can then be transferred to a physical embodiment to finish learning how to interact with the world.