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From: demers@odin.ucsd.edu (David E Demers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Discover magazine's "Invasion of the Insect Robots"
Message-ID: <17401@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Date: 12 Mar 91 01:16:58 GMT
References: <92995@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
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Organization: CSE Dept., UC San Diego
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In article <92995@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> loren@tristan.llnl.gov (Loren Petrich) writes:

>	In the current issue of "Discover" magazine, there is an
>article about attempting to construct robots with insect-level
>intelligence. It featured the work of Rodney Brooks, who has had great
>success with such robots.
[...]
>	Is this type of setup an example of "Fuzzy Logic"?

No, but there may be a way to express subsumption architectures
with Fuzzy logic.

[...]
>	There are a lot of analogies with the Neural Nets field -- a
>system not based on traditional, symbol-manipulating, AI that is much
>simpler than it and easily outperforms it, but which seems to have
>much less in the way of ultimate potential.

>	Is that fair?

Not really - they are different tools.  Although work is being
done on higher-level cognitive tasks with NNs (addition/subtraction,
for example), symbolic systems work better on many tasks.  They
are really two different methods, and comparing them is probably
not useful except with respect to a particular problem.  AI should
be inclusive; let's use the right tool for a particular task.



>	And does anyone else know of any details of Brooks's work?

He has published quite a bit.  You may want to look at the
recent collection of papers "AI at MIT: Expanding Frontiers"
edited by Patrick Winston (MIT Press, 1990) ISBN: 0-262-23150-6
The first two chapters of vol. 2 are by Brooks; one discusses
the subsumption architecture in general terms, the second
shows the application to six-legged locomotion.

-- 
Dave DeMers					demers@cs.ucsd.edu
Computer Science & Engineering	C-014		demers%cs@ucsd.bitnet
UC San Diego					...!ucsd!cs!demers
La Jolla, CA 92093-0114	  (619) 534-8187,-0688  ddemers@UCSD