Installing MindForth in a robot

No matter what theory is used for robot AI, with the recent success of MindForth in Win32Forth there is a great need for decisions to be made about robot mind-implants making use of the free AI Mind.

One decision to be made is whether the AI Mind will reside inside the robot or will merely be connected to the robot from a remote location, near or far, by telerobotics. A fullblown computer to hold Mind.Forth adds extra weight and power requirements to a robot. If your nation or corporation is embodying Mind.Forth in an off- planet habitat such as a satellite or a lunar outpost, then by all means have the MindForth computer on site and in-situ. If on the other hand the thinking computer is safely located away from its operating robot deployed in a dangerous or hostile environment, concentrate more on the speed and reliability of telecommunications than on housekeeping details for the after-all expendable robot portion of the mind-body equation, which actually has three parts -- data retained in mind operating in body. If the AI Mind is doing work, it is accumulating data which need to be safeguarded along with the AI and its robot.

Another decision, to be made by robot manufacturers, is just what kind of Mind to install in a particular class or production-run of robots. Even the most primitive versions of Mind.Forth contain a bootstrap sequence of words and concepts. It is easy to hire Forth programmers to customize, aggrandize or supersize the innate bootstrap "vault" of built-in knowledge and expertise. A robot manufacturer could offer specialist Minds for installation in otherwise run-of-the-mill robots. Like Xerox Corporation in 1959, whoever gets there first with a track-record of providing simple-minded psyches at first, followed by a string of ever smarter and more capable machine intelligences, may quickly come to dominate either niches of the AI robot market or the entire market itself. Watch for a landrush mentality in AI exploitation. Or, if you want to be complacent like the long-lines division of AT&T, continue to re-arrange the deck-chairs on the motor vessel Titanic.

Manufacturers and vendors of robot components should consider providing Forth code for the easy integration of each device into the sensorium or motorium of an intelligent, thinking robot. One way to collect such code is to host a Web forum where users may share and release code into the public domain.

Only robots above a certain level of sophistication may receive a mind-implant via MindForth. The computerized robot needs to have an operating system that will support Forth and sufficient memory to hold both the AI program code and a reasonably large knowledge base (KB) of experience. A Forth program is so portable from one version of Forth to another that robot manufacturers, vendors and users should not think of Mind.Forth as restricted to Win32Forth for implementation and operation, but as a candidate for upgrading to a 64-bit Forth running on a 64-bit system, thereby possessing a practically unlimited memory space. The Forth variant iForth is supposedly on its way to becoming a 64-bit Forth. People getting into Forth AI for the first time and with the option of adopting

64-bit technology from the very start, should do so with the realization that it will be an extremely long time before any further upgrade is made to 128-bit or higher technology. It is more likely that AI will go down into quantum technology before going up to 128-bit technology. So embrace and extend 64-bit AI.