I'll give the guy this: Tilden has implemented reflex into his BEAM robotics However, I don't see any of these bots doing much more than this. It seems to me that these things are just mechanical zombies. They don't do any thinking, they have no memory... they simply react to different stimuli...(which yes that is one part of the search for AI but it has been done before... this is not Tilden's discovery) These bots are no more than fun moving art projects.
At best, it seems to me that he is essentially just doing neural net learning manually... i.e. if one thing doesn't work he physically changes it to see if something else will work.... That isn't too natural. I agree with Boskovich, in that this is alchemy of the mid-evil period... not science.
All in all, let's face it. BEAM robotics is far from realm of artificial intelligence. BEAM will amount to little more than cool looking mindless mechanical devices wandering around, bumping into things and perhaps doing simple tasks with no memory of what they are and have been doing. In Tildens world an oven (which reacts to a set heat level) is intelligent.
The only promise to Tildens BEAM robotics, and all others in the field of artificial intelligence is if it is taken to the next step... that is much more complex networks *on the order of billions* which can self adapt (much like the brain) and carry and utilize memory.
Tilden seems to have achieved little more than building very simple analog microprocessors from the ground up.
Also, the A in BEAM... does it really need to be there? If the goal here is intelligent evolving robots... who cares about aesthetics?
BEAM robotics is great for the amateur robotic enthusiast, but it doesn't offer much promise for true future development in the area of artificial intelligence. Comments?
- Annan Mozeika