Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!voder!dtg.nsc.com!andrew
From: andrew@dtg.nsc.com (Lord Snooty @ The Giant Poisoned Electric Head       )
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: "Sensor Evolution"
Keywords: and your dog
Message-ID: <782@berlioz.nsc.com>
Date: 21 Mar 90 18:39:32 GMT
Organization: National Semiconductor, Santa Clara
Lines: 21

An article in "EE Times", March 19th, discusses projects on Artificial Life.
Perhaps the most radical proposal (by Cariani of Eaton-Peabody Labs, Boston)
is for a system which "evolves its own special sensors" in response to
the dynamic environment.

This piques my curiosity because it sounds impossible. Given (and it's a
big given) that sensor assembly technology were available to an automaton
in any case, how the hell would it know what to sense, given the
"requirement"? I take it that the "requirement" would be some kind of detection
of nonseparability in classification of environmental variables... which is
probably possible (but could also be highly nontrivial!).

Despite my incredulity at the proposal, automatic sensor (and indeed
effector) generation is part of what evolution is all about; the wing, the
eye, etc. So the existence proof is to be found in Nature.

But how to actually engineer this?
I'm all ears :-)
-- 
...........................................................................
Andrew Palfreyman	andrew@dtg.nsc.com	Albania before April!