Senses in the news:
- This seems too good to be true:
- But apparently it is true. See this paper and this blog post.
- If you're lucky enough to have eyes, here's a good analysis of how all your visual inputs get put together into a single representation.
- For robots, a sense of smell is important, too.
- The next robotic challenge: door-to-door combat operations.
More like this
There's been a lot of news about robots lately, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to synthesize what's going on in this field and offer a bit of speculation about where robotics is headed.
Kids love robots. I have a three-year-old friend who can identify the 1950s cult icon Robbie the Robot at 20 paces. My own son Jim could do an impressive multi-voiced impression of R2D2 by age five.
Holy cow! So Thomas Nagel could have his famous question answered by this young man...
Oops, I see that I wasn't the first to think of that connection. Should have checked the hyperlinks before commenting.
A friend of mine lost his eyes to cancer at the age of three. A few years later, he was cycling slowly around his area on ecolocation. Now he's a radio journalist.
Another blog was discussing whether or not there might be some sort of relation between the clicking sounds in Khoisan languages and this ability to navigate using echolocation. The Khoisan people live in a very open, dry part of Africa today, but long ago the area they inhabited was probably more heavily forested. It seems like a long-shot but echolocation might have come in handy.
What is it like to be a bat? (pdf)
Remarkable. See also Brice Mellen.
Yeah, that is really impressive, though I'd like to see some scientists taking a good look at what that kid does (it'd be interesting to see how much of his visual cortex has been taken over by his auditory system, too).
And the paper on cogprints is more than iffy.