Claude Shannon demonstrates Theseus, a magnetic maze-solving mouse [video]
techchannel.att.com
techchannel.att.com
Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone (http://goo.gl/VrBMUW)
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (http://goo.gl/Q5tzCW)
check this out for a modern example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExW_rxKdNJE
For those interested -- people are still interested in building maze solving robots, still called "micromouse". Here is one amazin micromouse that can traverse a maze and remember the solution very, very quickly. These days, its as much a mechanical problem (i.e. building a mouse that is robust, and has accurate sensors) as it is algorithmic.
My best guess is that they get earlier runs to "learn" the maze, then go for a speed run, is that right?
>The maze is made up of a 16 by 16 grid of cells, each 180 mm square with walls 50 mm high. The mice are completely autonomous robots that must find their way from a predetermined starting position to the central area of the maze unaided. The mouse will need to keep track of where it is, discover walls as it explores, map out the maze and detect when it has reached the goal. Having reached the goal, the mouse will typically perform additional searches of the maze until it has found an optimal route from the start to the center. Once the optimal route has been found, the mouse will run that route in the shortest possible time.
How does it move so smoothly?
(except much faster and bigger, of course)
"This is a bank of relays: telephone relays."
On a tangential note: just the other day I was having a conversation with a friend who felt that "phone" was an inaccurate and perhaps inappropriately diminutive term for the pocket computers that so many people carry now. I argued contrarily from a language-evolution standpoint, but if I were to find myself in a similar discussion again I think I might instead point toward what a tremendous role telephone systems and the people like Shannon who built them played in the development of what we now call computers. Smartphones are descendants of telephones but they're equally descendants of telephone systems.
rtmpdump -r 'rtmp://cp262207.edgefcs.net/ondemand/techchannel/10385/videos/OW10002.Claude_Shannon-FL8_550x310_700K' -o Claude_Shannon_Demonstrates_Machine_Learning.flvHe was basically fooling around "instead of work", creating such amazing things, while all the more people fooling around "instead of work" I see these days are at max creating high scores for Candy Crush...
Lot to learn. :)
It demonstrates without doubt that innovation can happen at a very large scale in very large, monopolistic, noncompetitive organizations. In fact, there's reason to believe that innovation might require a very large organization, because small companies don't have the funds needed to do research, and are likely to be unable to capture the market even if their research does bear fruit.
Like, you know, nations?
1) Theseus escaped from the Minotaur's Labyrinth, hence a maze-running robot.
2) First paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus says:
"""Theseus was a founder-hero, like Perseus, Cadmus, or Heracles, all of whom battled and overcame foes that were identified with an archaic religious and social order.[2] As Heracles was the Dorian hero, Theseus was a founding hero, considered by Athenians as their own great reformer (...)"""
Which meshes nicely with the Continuum character. Possibly for even more reasons, but I'm not super familiar with the Greek Theseus myth.