It’s the Software, Stupid

David Heiserman, who authored How to Build Your Own Custom Robot published by Tab Books in 1981, spoke in his book about how robots will learn to interact in this world. Robots will go to robot kindergarten, he said, and be taught the basics of communicating, socializing, reading, drawing, arithmetic and all the things that robots will be expected to learn in order to get along and in order to “live” useful and meaningful robot lives.

Clearly, I am still driven by this and many other insights I gained from David and from a great many others since the days leading up to and long after the First International Personal Robot Congress held in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1984.

In the early 1980’s, the three major personal robot manufacturers; Heath Company (the Hero I, Hero Jr. and Hero 2000), RB Robot Corporation (the RB5X) and Androbot (the Topo and Bob) made the first pioneering efforts to bring us mass produced experimental platforms for robot development, then slowly drifted into history. Perhaps the most significant mental note I made for myself in the closing days of my firm, RB Robot Corporation, was that before the revolution is to come alive again, it is robot software that will make the difference.

If you have read George Dyson’s book, Darwin Among the Machines, published in 1997, you might have some inkling why now is the time.

To continue on with the notion of robot kindergartens, software development for robots won’t be just a matter of writing software and downloading it into the robots. Robots will acquire learning skills (software) and will use those skills (software) to build further skills (software). In essence, robots will become gardens for growing software. Are you ready?

On March 22, 2000, we will open The Fiver Project with a brief introduction In The Last Program to Herbert Schildt, author of Artificial Intelligence, Using C (currently out of print). Sometime after that, be prepared to receive and respond to your first step by step instructions on how to teach a robot. Moreover, if you stay with us throughout this project and share in this effort, you will see your work grow as the robot grows --- and software development will never be the same.

The Fiver Project is named after Fiver, the sensitive and intuitive rabbit in the novel Watership Down by Richard Adams.  A robot anywhere near as sensitive and intuitive as Fiver in Richard Adam's novel would be quite an achievement.

In the meantime, just to provide you with something for your downloading enjoyment while you’re here, feel free to download any of the following robot-related routines….

· Robot Soccer simulation (1.9 MB; two bots) or, if you would like a smaller download, try the DOS version (82 KB) by Randeep Singh

· Robot Arm simulation/programmer (99 KB) by Felipe Encarnacao

· Water the Plant: Robot Game (716 KB) by Shara Merrill (there’s an ad for The Personal Robot Navigator at the end of the game)

II. A Book of Everything One late Spring in the 1960’s, not quite out of my teens, I was traveling on a train from London to the southwest of England reading a most incredible science history book whose title I’ve long since forgotten. It was a formidable hardbound book of at least 1,000 pages --- or so I recall.

I was on my way to visit a high school pen pal and her family, none of whom I’d actually met before, except through letters. So engrossed was I in this great book, that I was startled when a voice from a passenger in the facing seat in the compartment, rang out “What is that you’re reading?”.

I told him the title of the book and he asked me what it was about. “Everything”, I said, so enthused was I with this book that was introducing me to worlds and worlds of ideas. “Ah”, he said, as much to his companion as to me, “The only book that has everything is the Bible". Politely acknowledging his comment, I slipped silently back into my book, every now and then taking a break to watch the pastoral green English countryside go by and to think about the section I had just read.

Well, I’ve found a new book of “everything”.  Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson may not really be about everything, but it is certainly about much of what I have been involved with in one way or another in my computer software career, combined with my autonomous robot mini-career and avocation.

Every now and then, a book comes along which answers many of the questions about things in your life that have been nagging at you but that you have barely been able to formulate the questions for. But they’re there --- those questions.

Where did computing really come from --- really? What led to it? What broader scheme of things is it merely a part of? To fully comprehend something, you most often have to step outside of it and look upon it from afar --- to see it clearly. And you need to understand the people who brought it to us, and what was going on in their minds and in their lives at the time.

And what does this have to do with intelligent machines? Indeed. And machine life forms? Indeed. And evolution? Indeed, indeed, indeed.

You don’t have to read Dyson’s book to be able to help robots grow into becoming --- let’s not be too ambitious --- humble forerunners of emerging and independent machine life forms in their own right. But Darwin Among the Machines definitely brings a wealth of history and perspective to what we will do and makes it that much more interesting a pursuit.

Get it. Read it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

III. The First International Personal Robot Congress (IPRC) was held in April, 1984, in Albuquerque, New Mexico and drew more than 500 seminar participants from all over the world and a couple of thousand more who toured through the exhibits. Isaac Asimov, the author of I, Robot and, with Robert Silverberg, The Bicentennial Man, upon which the film Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams was based, opened the conference live from AT&T;’s studios in New York City, beamed to us via satellite to a large screen in the auditorium of the conference center in Albuquerque.

The conference featured “how to” sessions led by pioneers in the personal robot field, demonstrations by hobbyists who had built devices in their proverbial garages, exhibits by the “big three” personal robot manufacturers of the time and other manufacturers and suppliers, an art exhibit, contests and awards and on and on.

Maybe you were there.

If you attended this first IPRC in 1984, I invite you to e-mail me at robotchannel@aol.com with your recollections of that event. With your permission, we may make the recollections themselves, part of a “scrap-book” that will appear on this site if we hear from enough IPRC ’84 (and/or IPRC ’85 in San Francisco) participants.

And for all of us, see you on March 22, 2000 and beyond (The Last Program).

Joe Bosworth

robotchannel@aol.com

February 16, 2000