William Grey Walter: Animal

William Grey Walter was American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist. Explore interesting quotes on animal.
William Grey Walter: 24   quotes 0   likes

“[E]xperiments with a simple little machine, designed to mimic certain elementary features of animal behavior… Consisting only of two vacuum tubes, two motors, a photoelectric cell and a touch contact, all enclosed in a tortoise-shaped 'shell, the model was a species of artificial creature which could explore its surroundings and seek out favorable conditions. It was named Machine speculatrix.”

William Grey Walter

Source: A machine that learns (1951), p. 60.

Behavior , Animals

“Not in looks, but in action, the model must resemble an animal. Therefore it must have these or some measure of these attributes: exploration, curiosity, free-will in the sense of unpredictability, goalseeking, self-regulation, avoidance of dilemmas, foresight, memory, learning, forgetting, association of ideas, form recognition, and the elements of social accommodation. Such is life.”

William Grey Walter

Source: The Living Brain (1953), p. 120–121.

Life , Idea , Sense , Learning

“[A]n electro-mechanical creature which behaves so much like an animal that it has been known to drive a not usually timid lady upstairs to lock herself in her bedroom, an interesting blend of magic and science.”

William Grey Walter

Source: The Living Brain (1953), p. 82 : Description of the behavior of his first autonomous turtle robots, called Tortoise or Machina speculatrix.

Science , Animals

“[Walter even gave the tortoises a mock-biological name, Machina speculatrix] because they illustrate particularly the exploratory, speculative behaviour that is so characteristic of most animals.”

William Grey Walter

Source: An imitation of life (1950), p. 43 as cited in: Owen Holland (2003) " The first biologically inspired robots http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/holland02first.pdf"

Animals

“The first notion of constructing a free goal-seeking mechanism goes back a wartime talk with the psychologist, Kenneth Craik, whose untimely death was one of the greatest losses Cambridge has suffered in years. When he was engaged on a warjob for the Government, he came to get the help of an automatic analyzer with some very complicated curves he had obtained, curves relating to the aiming errors of air gunners. Goal-seeking missiles were literally much in the air in those days; so, in our minds, were scanning mechanisms. Long before the home study was turned into a workshop, the two ideas, goal-seeking and scanning, had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave like a very simple animal.”

William Grey Walter

Source: The Living Brain (1953), p. 82.

Death , Error , Home , Idea